


if you're squeamish don't prod the beach rubble

by gatsbyparty



Series: tinker tailor soldier sailor [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alien Culture, Alien Planet, Biotic Shepard (Mass Effect), Destroy Ending, F/M, Other, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 01:06:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14660037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: Garrus and Shepard have made it to Palaven, but they're no closer to answers. There's no trace of Garrus' family, they stumble into a conspiracy that reaches through the highest level of Palaven's government, and Shepard is wanted by the Alliance government. And what's all this about EDI and planned obsolescence?





	1. Chapter 1

Bells are ringing in Cipritine.

The dawn is bright and clear, no clouds for a thousand miles.The windows are cranked up to let in the unusual breeze, and slightly cooled air and the distant bells wind through the terminal. 

“Feels like the first day of September,” Shepard says, peeling off her jacket and mask the minute she’s under the radiation blocking of the terminal ceiling. Far behind her, Alliance marines bicker with the Langenauers, though most of them have given up and gone back to the ship. 

“Feels like midwinter,” Garrus says, amused. It’s a loadlifter, being in Cipritine. Not his favorite city on Palaven-it’s blocky and ugly and expensive-but hell if it’s not a sight more friendly to him than Earth. “Put your mask back on, the windows are open.”

Shepard grouses to herself, but pulls the mask back up, smearing the grit and dirt outline across her face and wiping her hand on her jacket in disgust. Only a little muffled, she says, “Don’t forget, Garrus. We have a deal.”

“Which one?” he asks, mood dropping straight back down but attempting levity. “I know, I know. We’ll talk about it when it’s all taken care of. I know.”

“Sorry,” Shepard says. “Please enjoy a morning without the looming specter of my trauma.”

“I will,” he says, and goes to clap her on the back, then awkwardly dropping his hand. She laughs anyway. “Look on the bright side, Shepard. If my mother’s alive and you embarrass yourself, she won’t remember it anyway.”

“Damn,” Shepard says, and whistles. Garrus winces at the turned heads it draws. They aren’t acting too familiarly and Shepard is dressed very correctly for polite Cipritine society, but they get an awful lot of looks, though Garrus assumes most people they pass are staring because they’re trying to figure out what the hell Shepard is sitting in. On the other hand, humans are an exotic sight in Cipritine.

Hell, anywhere on Palaven. He chuckles. Shepard’s going to get put in a spaceport zoo if she isn’t careful. She’s just so small and so visible. 

“Oh, look at this,” Garrus says, veering off to the side of the terminal to stand at one of the windows. He hoists himself up onto the railing and pokes his head through the opening; his scalp tingles from the shielding, and the sun is warm on his face. He can’t see the city proper from here, but he can picture the bells clanging in their towers-the warning sirens have been quietly retired-every time a ship or shuttle touches down. He can’t see the rubble from here either, and the breeze has cleared much of the smog from the air.

He’s still a distance from home, but it’s like even the air molecules feel familiar. 

“Huh,” Shepard says, and he looks down. Her head doesn’t quite reach the window, and she’s got her ‘confused alien’ look again. “Looks like...dirt and pavement from here.”

“Correct,” Garrus says, and turns his head back to the window. “Dirt with native bacteria, Shepard.”

“Sure,” Shepard says, something warm in her voice, and when he drops out of the window she’s laughing at him, he can tell. “Protein you can eat without shitting yourself, too.”

“Well,” Garrus says, “At least you can get drunk.”

“Someone has to step into the breach,” Shepard says grimly.

“Shepard,” Garrus says gently. “You’re not the first human on Palaven.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shepard says. “Show me your alien bacteria already.”

Garrus again does an uncomfortable hand-hovering over the wheelchair, then firmly sticks his hands at his sides and lets Shepard block half the concourse as she navigates turning the wheelchair. 

“So, tell me, Shepard, how do we feel about the wheelchair?” Garrus asks, and makes it to a count of two before Shepard’s mouth pinches. 

“We feel the chair is,” Shepard says, works her mouth for a minute, “We feel the chair is better than dragging myself with my tongue.”

“Very nice,” Garrus says.

“I told you,” Shepard says. “I can be positive. For example. I like that the concourse smells like pretzels.”

“Not pretzels,” Garrus says. “Dozud.”

“Dozud,” Shepard repeats, and quirks her mouth. “I didn’t say that right.”

“Not even close,” Garrus says cheerfully. “Didn’t they teach you anything about language in your N7 program?”

“Thoroughly,” Shepard says. “With a really big stick.”

“Somehow that doesn’t seem right,” Garrus says. 

“Yeah, well, it’s not wrong unless a native speaker can’t understand the intent. Anyway, it was theoretical linguistics, not applied,” Shepard says, a bit waspish. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Garrus says. “Save it for your friends back on the ship, I don’t care about your human science.”

“Fuck off,” Shepard says, and speeds up. 

“That works really well,” Garrus says, “Unless I flip your brakes on.”

“Don’t you dare,” Shepard says, but mildly, like she doesn’t think he would. He does consider it, briefly, but then remembers his sickening guilt at snapping her first prosthetics. Probably not worth it.

“You want to know something even better than your terrible taste in turian food?” 

“No,” Shepard says. 

“I don’t have to pay import taxes on clothing here,” Garrus says. 

“What other crumbs of joy can you wring from your lackluster existence?” Shepard drawls, leaning her head back to look at him, narrowly avoiding running down an elderly turian woman.

“We’re on a romantic getaway,” Garrus offers. 

“No, we aren’t,” Shepard says flatly. 

“Oh, gimme a leg to stand on here, Shepard.”

This gets him a withering glare. Belatedly Garrus realizes Shepard isn’t fucking with him. She really is in an awful mood. What is it about this worn down, miserable, contemptuous woman?

“Want me to push you so you can sulk?” Garrus asks. 

“Yes,” Shepard says, and scowls, theatrically almost, crossing her arms and hiking her stumps onto the seat. Garrus stops, turning around to look at her, and tucks his mandibles tighter to his jaw.

“Shepard,” he says. “I’m not pushing you.” 

“Well,” Shepard says, uncrossing her arms and displaying her palms. “I’m not getting up anytime soon.”

“You can drag yourself,” Garrus says, unimpressed. “I see two arms there.”

“It didn’t fly up and it didn’t crawl,” Shepard grumbles to herself, but she starts wheeling herself. 

“Are you just hungry?” Garrus asks.

“No,” Shepard says. “I’m suicidal, you insensitive asshole.”

“Right, right,” he says, and steps out into a city that feels like a movie set, an old building long since abandoned, and at any moment the whole flimsy thing will collapse. He takes a deep breath, and takes another step, and the world rights. “Look, the doors are automatic.”

“Fancy,” Shepard says, waiting for a family to clear the doorway before she cautiously rolls over the threshold and into the street. “Very dry on your planet, isn’t it?”

“Keep your jacket on,” Garrus reminds her, and she fidgets with the zip irritably before pulling it on. Her face is already red with the heat, and the day has only started to warm up. 

“Maybe I want radiation poisoning,” she grouses. 

“You don’t,” he says. “And yes, it’s pretty dry, but I’ll take you to see the levees outside the city if you want-very impressive.”

He clamps his mandibles tight to his jaw again; he doesn’t even know if the levees are still there, or if the massive honeycombs have anything behind them but dust. He can see the floodwater marks on the buildings around them, most higher than his arms can reach. 

“Well, I’d like to glow in the dark,” Shepard says, sounding contemplative. 

“You’re already short two feet,” Garrus says. Shepard snorts. 

“Take me to these levees,” Shepard says. “Will I….Am I going to fit on public transport?”

Garrus looks up and down the street, at the wide ripples of half-melted pavement and scattered turians going about their business. Not a bus in sight. Cipritine looks vastly better than the last time he was here, but he wouldn’t drive anything without tank treads over those craters. 

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he says eventually. 

“Where is the American embassy?” Shepard demands. “Why did I leave the ship?”

“Because you’re nosy?” Garrus points out. “You’re going the wrong way, Shepard.”

Shepard stops, turns herself, and passes him again. 

“That thing needs a storage rack,” Garrus says. “And some armor.”

“A footrest,” Shepard says. 

“What, to put cups on?”

“To rest my fucking feet on, Garrus,” Shepard says. 

He laughs, loud and rasping, and she looks bemused. He feels different, in Cipritine, in ways he can’t quite pin down. His carapace is brighter and deeper out of Earth’s flat air, and no one gives a second glance at his crest rippling in the heat.

Well, he thinks. Of course he feels alright. 

He’s almost home.

Shepard swears over and over, mostly to herself but some louder, as she slams the wheelchair into potholes and over cracks. He almost tells her the sidewalk is more intact closer to the buildings, but it sounds like she has it under control. There are long stretches of repaired pavement, and others with potholes the span of his arms. 

“Damn it!” Shepard barks, almost pitching out of her chair before finally reaching a smooth stretch of pavement, and she manages to pass him. “Please tell me we aren’t going very far.”

Garrus considers, and says “No. We can go to the levees another day.”

“Thank God,” Shepard says. 

“We’re going to my parents’ house,” Garrus says.

“Ah, fuck,” Shepard says. 

“Shepard, sweetie,” Garrus says. “Remember: you wore your fancy hazmat suit. It’ll be fine.”

“Sorry I forgot my pearls,” Shepard says, and when she doesn’t protest the ‘sweetie’, Garrus manages not to grin. 

“I don’t know what that is,” he says, and it’s true, but they’re at the building his parents’ apartment is in, and he’s trying to avoid the thought, but he can only get so far away before he feels it yanking on his neck. 

The entire top half of the building is gone, and most of the bottom half. 

He keeps walking, doesn’t slow down or turn his head. 

“Thure,” Garrus says, very quietly, and does not lift his eyes. 

“That’s ‘fuck’,” Shepard says in delight. Of course she can only remember the curse words. “Which, you know, I thought was the verb, but what do I know!”

“It is,” Garrus says. “English just ruins everything for me.”

“You’re speaking English right now,” Shepard says. 

“No,” Garrus says. “I’m not. I’m speaking Imperan.”

“Fuck,” Shepard says. “So am I.”

Garrus pats her on the shoulder. He stops walking. After a moment, he says, “Shepard, is it just me or is there no one around anymore?”

Shepard lounges in her chair, almost indolent, if the observer has never seen her truly relaxed before. “Oh, no,” she says, without looking to either side, still in Imperan. “We’re quite alone. Strange, is it?”

“It is,” Garrus says. 

The storefront across the street explodes, dust and stone creaking and smashing to the street, and Shepard throws herself out of the wheelchair with barely enough time to throw up a barrier. The worst of the debris is thrown aside, but a rain of pebbles still hits them both. 

“God fucking damn it,” Shepard says. Her language has gotten so much worse since leaving Earth. Garrus waits a moment to move, filled with the sick anticipation of knowing his seizure monitor could go off at any moment, and then rolls to his feet when it doesn’t. 

He hoists Shepard up at the waist and gets the hell out of Dodge. No weapons, no armor, and her wheelchair is missing a tire. It takes three times as long to get back; Garrus ducks into buildings every time he hears something, and the streets are still desolate. Shepard is heavy as hell and doesn’t help. She goes slack as soon as they’re inside the doors of the terminal, and he doesn’t even get into the ship before she slips to the ground. She drags herself up the two steps and swats away the marines that come swarming to the top of the ramp. 

His first instinct is to get in touch with the local police, but he has no idea what remnants are still alive, nevermind functioning. He tells one of the marines to get on the phone anyway, and sends another out into the terminal to ask around. His second instinct is to go out hunting, and instead he settles on the floor next to Shepard in the rec room and helps her pick bits of cement out of her jacket. 

“I probably should have warned you about our explosives drills,” Garrus says. 

“I would have worn a helmet,” Shepard says. Her face is bone white, and her hand shakes when she lifts the pieces of cement. “Did you catch the Peeping Tom in the building above us?”

“No,” Garrus says. “Did you see the one in the sewer grate?”

“No,” Shepard says. “I bet he was ugly.”

“She,” Garrus says. “Think it was an assassination attempt?”

“No,” Shepard says frankly. “They let us leave.”

Garrus breathes in through his nose and out again, very slowly. Not important that the apartment is gone. Most of the planet is gone. People are still all over the place. That’s been the problem the whole time. He’s known that would be a problem. It’s only the street explosions that are new, and it’s such a small roadblock. 

Still, it yanks at his neck like a leash. 

“I’m not setting foot out of this ship again,” Shepard says, and her voice is so flat he doesn’t even go for the cheap shot. 

“You keep telling me how much you hate recycled air,” Garrus says. 

“I do,” Shepard says, wilting. 

Garrus does the awkward contortions necessary to rest his back against the ship and closes his eyes, suddenly uncomfortable seeing his own legs splayed out next to Shepard’s stumps. Three quarters of the damn building is gone. It’s not the house he grew up in-it’s not even a full time residence for his parents-but he and his father had talks in that apartment, like a regular family’s conversations. His sister lived there through university. His grandmother’s dream-weavings were still hanging on the walls. His mother stayed there during rounds of treatment because it was cozy, and better, easy for her to navigate without reminders. 

Where the hell is his mother?

“I’m hungry,” Shepard says, continuing her litany of misery, but Garrus is only briefly stirred from his own. 

Something fearful, something beyond comprehension; he has a sense of a vast terror somewhere just out of his reach, some mercy keeping it at bay but keeping him aware it circles overhead.

“I,” Garrus says, clear and precise, “am having a nervous breakdown.”

“We’re on a fun vacation,” Shepard says. “We’re having a nice trip.”

“Sightseeing,” Garrus says. 

“No,” Shepard says, and sighs through her nose. “I think maybe we’re both having a nervous breakdown.”

“Mr Vakarian?” one of the marines says, and then tries, “General Vakarian?”

“Nice try,” Shepard says. 

“Thank you,” the marine says, looking bemused. 

“What do you want,” Garrus says, in one mouthful, reining in his nerves. Barely, he does not do this physically; his arms twitch. Things in his gut keep squirming, like anxiety or a tapeworm. 

“I got in touch with the CPD,” the marine says. While Garrus is working out ‘CPD’, the marine continues, “Apparently this has been an issue for a while. They, uh, made it very clear it’s posted on the city’s tourist alerts.”

“Which, naturally, I would have looked at,” Garrus says. The marine neither confirms nor denies this. 

“CPD wants you to swing by when you have time,” the marine says. 

“To tell me how much it isn’t their fault?” Garrus asks. The marine neither confirms nor denies. Garrus says, “Thanks. Go get a beer.”

“There’s one more thing,” the marine says.

“Yes?” Shepard says. 

“There’s a warrant out for you, Commander Shepard,” the marine says, and Shepard blanches. “A court martial. Don’t go near the Earth embassy or they’ll haul you back. It came through awful fast, so I’d say it’s maybe bad. Just stay clear.”

The marine flees, and Shepard watches her go in a flat way that reminds him uncomfortably of EDI. 

“They don’t trust you,” she says. “I assumed they didn’t, but she was genuinely afraid of you.”

“What do they think happened to us?” Garrus asks, amused. “That I kidnapped you away to a planet I’m allergic to?”

“No,” Shepard says. “That you kidnapped me away to a planet I’m allergic to.”

“Huh,” Garrus says. “I don’t know, Shepard. I think you’re reaching. There isn’t exactly a flood of turians coming to steal your women.”

“Well,” Shepard says. “Maybe it’s the teeth.”

“Maybe she’s racist,” Garrus says, and all at once he goes from slightly hysterical to livid. Of course the marine is afraid of him. She saw him dragging Shepard away from her clone’s body, saw him spit on the pile of cracked bone and meat left behind. 

Garrus pauses on this, and runs it back. “No,” he says eventually. “Shepard, I think she was afraid of you.”

His anger drains away, the plug pulled. Senseless, he knows, but then he also knows the exact shape and size of the things tucked away in his brain chemistry, the memories woven into the noose around his neck. 

“What,” Shepard says, in honest bafflement, like she’s never once considered that people could be afraid of her, like she’s never been afraid of herself. 

Garrus considers how to phrase his explanation delicately, and remains silent. She is so small and knife-boned and alien with blunt-chipped teeth-how humans became apex predators he will never understand-and Garrus is not a scientist, he doesn’t know why she smells like protein but not like food, and he still doesn’t understand what acne is, no matter how many times it’s explained. If she doesn’t grasp why her own species would find her frightening, he isn’t going to be the one to explain it. 

“A court martial,” Shepard muses. “Well, they can kill me before they drag me back to Earth. I’m not sorry for smashing up that clone.”

“I wouldn’t be either, but a court martial?” Garrus asks. “Shepard, I know that bothers you.”

“Well, sure,” Shepard says. “But they can’t force me back, and they can’t touch me here.”

“No,” Garrus says. “They can. Extradition treaty.”

“Ah, fuck,” Shepard says. “Don’t suppose you have any churches where I can claim sanctuary.”

“Mmm,” Garrus says. “Not sanctuary, but you can apply for temporary protected status if a full citizen takes responsibility for you.”

“Even a dangerous criminal?” Shepard asks, waggling her eyebrows.

“There’s special provisions for defecting military of an enemy, and for biotics,” Garrus says, and clears his throat, though it does nothing to make him feel less awkward. “You actually could, uh, become a full citizen through marriage, instead of joining the military. Much easier.” 

“I can’t imagine that applies for a non-turian,” Shepard says.

“Actually,” Garrus says. “It’s not specified, which means Grunt and I could fill out some paperwork and he’d be Mr Vakarian, full citizen and...however many in line for Primarch.”

“Primarch Shepard,” Shepard says, with that worrying glint in her eye that means she’s having a daydream that should scare the daylights out of everyone around her. 

“Let’s take a walk,” Garrus says. “Call on CPD.”

“Are you going to carry me?” Shepard asks, her voice so acidic it startles him. 

“Relax,” Garrus says. Neither of them is on their medication, barring Garrus’ seizure meds, and even those are running low. This, though, sparks a slightly more cheerful thought-turian hospitals! Turian doctors! 

Turian painkillers!

“Let ‘em come here,” Garrus says. “It’s never killed anyone to go outside on a nice day.”

Wistfully, Garrus wishes his own statement were true. Praetor Arwyroe Vakarian was beset by her own armsmen and beaten to death in retribution for the sacking of the 2nd District, nearly four hundred years to the day previously. It was, of course, a beautiful day. Arwyroe was a distant relation, but Garrus has never lost his childhood mistrust of cool sunny days. 

Warrant Officer Nerian Oxa is the unfortunate dispatched to the ship. Oxa is unusually short for a turian, maybe Shepard’s height with her old legs, and unusually squat; Garrus is put in mind of a beer keg. Oxa’s undress blacks are worn through in several places and almost grey from laundering. Garrus is unimpressed. He also has the sagging crest and dull skin of a long illness, and Garrus settles his chair just a bit further back after they’ve exchanged greetings. He’s been away from native germs for too long to not be a little worried. 

“So if you coordinate the municipal food service program, what got you booted out here to us?” Garrus asks, friendly, but genuinely curious. Talking to the two of them is surely a noteworthy experience for Oxa, but it’s hardly important as far as the city is concerned, and the food service program is almost certainly still in chaos. “Lots of coordinating waiting for you, I’m sure.”

Oxa smiles, in the turian way, not the human, and Garrus is pleased to see Shepard doesn’t flinch at all. There’s a lot of teeth on display with Oxa’s mandibles held like that. A lot of unusually sharp teeth, actually. They’re still speaking in Imperan, and Shepard is following along, if not contributing. Well, and she’s only ever spoken to himself or the Langenauers in Imperan. Let her be shy. 

“I moonlight as a probable cause investigator,” Oxa says. “Staffing issues, you know how it goes. I did a stint way back in basic, I’m the only one with any experience. I have a teenager covering my meetings right now.”

“Oh, dear,” Shepard says, in English, but Oxa doesn’t look at her or react. Garrus hopes they didn’t send a racist. A probable cause investigator makes him some nervous, and they’re supposed to have an iron grip on biases. Shepard and he aren’t under investigation, but it’s a canary in the krill mine. Coal? Bowl? Coal mine, he corrects himself. 

“Reasonable,” Garrus says. “I wouldn’t mind a trip to one of those meetings, myself. The logistics would be illuminating.”

“I can imagine,” Oxa says. “Perhaps another time. They are endless. Especially with the nurturing centers still open-you wouldn’t expect children to eat quite so much. Still. I know how you described the incident earlier today, and I won’t ask you to repeat it. It follows a pattern we’ve been dealing with for the last year. The major difference, naturally, is you two.”

“Naturally,” Garrus says. “I imagine they don’t often set off explosives and linger to be seen.”

“No,” Oxa agrees. “That, and normally there’s a target, usually infrastructure. I’m inclined to think this was a snatching of opportunity.”

“Infrastructure?” Garrus repeats. 

“The fog harps are a common one,” Oxa confirms. “The fog harps, and the levees.”

“Water sources?” Garrus asks. “Seems...shortsighted.”

“Oh, yeah,” Oxa says. “They’re rural kids, I think. Got reason to believe they’re based out of the interior.”

Implied is superstitious and ignorant. The stereotypes are varied and many, but those two are constants. Garrus can see how the fog harps looming over the city might draw all sorts of attention, but attacking a water source on a dry planet seems like a bad idea all around. 

His first thought is that it’s a distraction to steal the water from the vast tanks under the fog harps, but surely Oxa has thought of that.

Oxa has noticed Shepard, now, and Garrus forgets the thought as quickly as it came. Oxa noticeably tilts his head to look at Shepard’s lower body, and his mandibles are drooping in a distracted, horrified way. 

“What’s he looking at?” Shepard asks. Garrus doesn’t think it likely Oxa speaks English, but her voice is ice-cold, and he averts his gaze. 

“Warrant Officer,” Garrus says without looking at Shepard himself. “Forgive me for changing the subject, but when were the missing postings last updated?”

“This morning,” Oxa says, still preoccupied, though he meets Garrus’s eyes. “Forgive me yourself, but I don’t recall seeing any Vakarians. Feel free to look it over, of course.”

Nauseated, tense, Garrus nods. Found? Never reported missing? Alive, or just meat in the dirt? He almost hopes Shepard will comfort him, in a bitter half-thought kind of way, but she makes no move towards him. 

“Interesting,” Garrus says. “Thank you, I’ll take a look.”

“There are less and less changes to the list these days,” Oxa says, though there’s an apologetic set to his head. 

“Yes,” Garrus says, and Oxa takes his leave, looking increasingly uncomfortable, though he assures Garrus he will be back in the morning. Shepard rounds on him, and Garrus shifts uncomfortably, ready for Shepard to eviscerate Oxa. 

“What’s this interior like?” Shepard asks. 

“Miserable,” Garrus says, quite honestly, wheeling to shift gears. “Empty. It’s where all the malcontents and university radicals go to set up communes.”

“Oh,” Shepard says, and appears to absorb this. “I’ll have to buy some sunscreen, then. And a primer on turian political history.”

“You’d fit right in,” Garrus says. “What’s sunscreen?”

“It keeps me from getting tumors,” Shepard says. 

“Ah,” Garrus says. “That explains why you don’t have any. You’re not going to the interior, though.”

“Try again,” Shepard says, and sighs. 

“No,” Garrus says. “I’m retired.”

“The first thing Nerian Oxa is going to ask you tomorrow morning is if you’ll pop on over and investigate,” Shepard says. “And you’ll object, and he’ll politely point out that you have nothing else to do, and that you could perhaps take a look for whoever you’re waiting to find on that list in the meantime.”

“And I’ll say no,” Garrus says. 

“No, you won’t,” Shepard says, and flags over a marine to fetch sunscreen from the spaceport’s duty-free shop. 

Shepard, of course, is right, though Garrus at least manages to sleep for a full fifteen hours before Oxa shows up. Shepard, he thinks, naps at some point. She spends the entire afternoon and morning assuring herself of EDI and the Langenauers safety with the marines. It’s endearing, and alarming; she’s bone white and trembling. She refuses both the stubbies and the wheelchair scrounged up in favor of a four-legged robotic mount. It’s meant for ground warfare, but she manages to walk in it with an hour of training, so Garrus doesn’t say anything.

“Like a horse,” she says, pleased, as she’s arranging it in the case and setting it in the truck-she keeps calling it a jeep. 

“Why?” Garrus asks. 

“Sitting on it? Like a horse?” Shepard offers. “Nevermind.” 

They start off through the warren of roads in downtown Cipritine, though the moment they go through the last rotary it drops to a single road and stays that way. The road stretches long and serpentine ahead. They wind through the sole mountain range in the hemisphere, though it hardly deserves the name. The scrawny peaks are baked white from the sun. The jeep bumps and jerks along as the pavement goes from tar to gravel and back. 

“Brace”, Garrus says absently at the first false drop. Shepard blurts an abrupt, enraged shriek as the jeep suddenly levels out, and then howls at him again at the second drop. The road bends back and down over hills, so it disappears in a blink. He knows he could have warned her sooner, but his eyes are on the horizon and his mind is about a million light years away. (his mother, his father, his sister, Shepard, EDI)

At last they crest the final pass, and the fog harps drop away behind them, and the city, and the coastline. The levees become indistinct smears of shadow. For a moment, Cipritine hulks in the rear view mirror, and then even that vanishes,and there is nothing but the road ahead and behind, stretching out, filling up all the empty spaces. 

Garrus despises the interior. 

Oh, he understands it’s a mindless prejudice, and it’s childish to hold onto. He knows the interior is where all the greenhouses and solar farms flourish. He knows if anything is Palaven’s heartbeat, it’s the interior. It’s where his species, way back in the tiniest crawling ancestor, came from, and it should be a comfort to whatever remnant of that ancestor lives in his brain, like Shepard eating berries in a tree or whatever primates do. 

Still, even before he lived on Earth, with all its profligate rains and fogs, it made him feel pinned. Exposed. Too much and too empty. Three quarters of Palaven lives on the coastline of this particular continent. There are, perhaps, a hundred thousand turians scattered over the thousands of kilometers of the interior, all of them rural hicks.

Of course, they are rural hicks who run merciless industry-destroying monopolies, but still. Almost none of them even bother to go for full citizenship. They don’t pay taxes, and when they do they get a hefty rebate for settling in an underserved community. They don’t even serve in the military. He respects the take none and give none attitude, but there comes a time in a man’s life when he wants civilization around him, not sixteen hundred sheep imported from another planet so he can try his luck. 

Strangely, they pass none of the sheep (absurdly, they are flourishing, raised by a distant cousin of his mother); the solar panels beside the road are smashed and dirty; no one raises an outcry when Garrus parks outside the compound of his mother’s cousin. 

Garrus calls a greeting in Qotu, and then another in Imperan when no one answers the first. 

“Damn paranoid old bastard,” Garrus says, sighs, and waves Shepard out of the Jeep. She takes a swaying, tentative step with her front leg, and very delicately makes her way out. 

He goes around the side of the compound, following the fence with Shepard trailing behind -avoiding rocks, he is amused to note- to the back door. He rattles the handle and yells. He bangs on the glass. He threatens to call the authorities. Eventually, someone comes to find out what the racket is. A very tall turian woman opens the door. Her fringe is stiff and discolored with age, but she is unbent and she moves easily. 

“Oh,” his mother’s cousin Edyt says sourly. “It’s you.”

“Hi,” Shepard says cheerfully, and Edyt gives her a blank look. A child yowls far away, inside the house.

“Careful,” Garrus says, to both of them, and gets nearly identical scowls. 

“Go away,” Edyt says. “Your mother isn’t here.”

She goes to slam the door, and Shepard wedges the robot’s leg in the doorway. 

“We’re here to solve your explosion problem,” Shepard says. 

“I don’t care,” Edyt says. 

“You speak English,” Shepard says. “You have sheep. Allegedly.”

“I used to have sheep,” Edyt says. 

“That kid yells in English,” Shepard says. “Garrus, where the hell am I?”

Garrus sighs, and waits for Edyt to open the door suspiciously before slipping through into the kitchen. He wishes he had fond childhood memories of this room, instead of Edyt openly despising him. Well, to be fair, he despised her too, and she knows he thinks everyone in the interior is a xenophobic technocratic hick. 

“She’s an irenic,” he says to Shepard in an undertone. “Political party that advocates for greater integration with human societies.”

“Ah,” Shepard says. “I imagine that’s...unpopular.”

“Not like it used to be,” Edyt says, shutting the door behind them. “We’re actually becoming quite popular with the young people.”

“I see,” Shepard says. 

“Our societies are the most similar, in all the galaxy,” Edyt says. “I could give you the whole presentation, but it boils down to that. We strive to cultivate a spirit of mutual understanding.”

“The pacifists are always the weird ones,” Garrus says. “They’re most effective when someone else stands behind them with a rifle, though.”

“There is a lot of overlap,” Edyt clarifies, though she gives Garrus a pointed look. “Unity is a virtue and a strength. We feel that unity comes from peace.”

“What, did I find the switch to make you friendly?” Shepard asks. 

“She’s a lecturer,” Garrus says.

“Why are you here, Garrus?” Edyt asks. 

“Who better to help me out?”

“Cut the shit,” Edyt says. “I haven’t seen your mother, and you know I wouldn’t lend you money.”

“I’ve been asked to look into a string of attacks on water reclamation centers,” Garrus says. “The fog harps, the levees, you know.”

“There are no levees in the interior,” Edyt says flatly. 

“No, but there are demolitions experts,” Garrus says. “Ones with grudges and free time.”

“What, Kunagnos and his decrepit pack of friends?” Edyt asks, and snorts. A few cans clank noisily to the counter and floor, and Shepard freezes, coloring. 

“Sorry,” she says, as if she wasn’t going through a stranger’s cabinets. “Anyway, aren’t most of you out here because you’ve been sentenced to hard labor? Sounds like a good enough grudge to me.”

“Most of us, perhaps,” Edyt says, with a deep snarl in her voice that makes Shepard instinctively step back, and one of the cans crunches under her mount’s foot. “Others are here because we feel our society is better served by helping those most in need, rather than blowing up alien children.”

“Oh, come off it,” Garrus says. Edyt was hastatim for thirty years. He knows how humans feel about the hastatim, and she’s about the last person allowed to give Shepard any shit. He doesn’t know what kind of action hastatim see these days-he doesn’t have the clearance level-but Edyt got her hands dirty, too. 

Shepard shrugs it off, though, more easily than he’s seen her duck a blow in some time. “Look, I’m an ignorant alien, what can I say?”

“So many of you are,” Edyt says, sneering faintly. It looks enough like a neutral expression that maybe Shepard doesn’t catch it, but Garrus has a hunch she does. He shrugs a little, when she looks at him. The pacifists really are always a little weird, and Edyt is a complicated person. She’s genuine in her irenic stances, and she’s genuine in her flagrant derision of aliens. He finds it all a bit paternalistic, but then humans are like that all the time. He snorts. Must be something she picked up from them. 

“It’s locals blowing up the sole water sources,” Garrus says. 

“Hardly,” Edyt says, her snarl coming back. “What do you see that is destroyed? It’s obviously a ploy to steal our water.”

“Ah,” Shepard says, a little glee on her face, and Garrus begins to be alarmed. “So you know what we’re talking about.”

“Obviously,” Edyt says. “You know how much water I need to keep this place running? There’s plenty, but it’s twice as expensive.”

“The levees actually are destroyed,” Garrus says. 

“Reapers,” Edyt says. “They were never rebuilt properly.”

The interior is flat and dry, like all of Palaven, but without the massive infrastructure that makes the cities so life-swollen. Cipritine’s levees hold back desalinated ocean water, enough for the entire coast, and it’s supposed to be portioned out to the interior. All of the water-intensive farming happens out here, where they have the space and a largely captive population looking for a purpose. Garrus heard very early in the war about the levees’ destruction and the flooding, but they were also repaired about the minute the war ended. Interesting of Edyt to say that. Yet more interesting that Edyt knows and admits it. 

“No, I don’t think Kunagnos is involved,” Garrus says. “I think you are, Edyt.”

“Well,” Edyt says, and dithers, like he’s going to do a citizen’s execution right there in her kitchen if she admits it.

“I think you’re investigating, you nosy old fool,” Garrus says. “You’ve hired every teenager in the area to work with the sheep for the last fifteen years. I think you’re sussing them all out.”

After a moment of dull glaring, Edyt waves a hand towards the stairs leading out of the kitchen. “Come take a look at what I’ve found. Then you can get the hell out.”


	2. Chapter 2

They stall out on the stairs. The robotic mounts are flexible, with a wide range of motion, but the angle of the steps combined with how Shepard is forced to grip the back make it unable to get up the steps. Garrus doesn’t dare offer to carry her, and Edyt bounds up the stairs immediately. 

“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” Shepard chants as she slides off the robot and sits on the bottom stair to lift herself backwards with her hands. The wry twist to her mouth invites him to make a joke of it, to join in, and he knows that she is not in the mood to appreciate comfort. Hell, she ducks from his hand on a good day, and she hasn’t even made eye contact with him today. It’s glaringly noticeable how she’s contorting to keep her distance when he takes a step forward to help. 

Turians tend to adjust well to life after an injury, because of the social support net, and Garrus is largely unconcerned how his seizures will affect him or his future outside of a general worry about his health. Shepard is a whole new ballpark of neurosis, and humans don’t handle the transition nearly as well, in his experience. It’s understandable, for a people that by and large don’t seem to care how anyone else is doing. It also makes it a goddamned labyrinth to figure out how to help. 

Garrus positions himself at the bottom of the stairs to spot her. She isn’t going to fall, but if she does, he has his hands out. When she reaches the top an eternity later he follows, with the robot tucked under his arm. She drags herself up onto it, looking grim, and they join Edyt in the little room to the right of the stairs. There is a table and a scattering of chairs. Shepard heaves herself into one. The entire wall is taken up by scrawled notes.

“Done waiting on your girlfriend?” Edyt asks in Qotu, though she uses the English word, and Shepard’s scowl degrades into something a krogan would find threatening. It feels slimy, the way Edyt says it, rot glistening on meat. Blind jabs in the dark, Garrus knows, and only because Edyt has already decided she doesn’t like Shepard, but damn if it doesn’t bother him anyway.

“Fuck off,” Shepard says, in a desultory irritated sort of way, and the faint rattle of Edyt’s breathing goes to a full-bore snarl like a throttle being spun. The room fills with the smell of ozone, and Garrus goes lightheaded for a moment. Edyt’s snarling gets louder. 

“So you’ve found something,” Garrus says, side-stepping the issue entirely. After a moment Shepard sags into her chair, and the reek of ozone fades. His sight rocks and then settles. 

“Something,” Edyt says, and rolls her shoulders. Her snarl cuts out flat. “The price of water has tripled in the last few months.”

“Water is price-controlled,” Garrus points out, and at Shepard’s eyebrows lifting he adds, “Municipal resource. The distribution programs collect vouchers to track usage outside of the household allowance.”

“Which is concerning to many of us in the interior,” Edyt says. “I am not bothered, but Maccus Oran is. Severely.”

“Why is Maccus Oran bothered by this?” Shepard asks. 

“The rise in cost means we’re buying less,” Edyt says. “Of something that is quite important to the industries out here. Solar batteries are water-cooled, and the greenhouse irrigations are efficient but thirsty.”

“So the programs have less to track,” Shepard says, looking more confused than before. “Aren’t business-related uses part of your allotment?”

“No, that’s not the issue,” Edyt says. “No more footnotes, Garrus. Maccus Oran is bothered because he siphons off his water allowance from his son’s and doesn’t want to pay for it. So we’ve been organizing a little community watchdog to find out what’s going on.”

She indicates a few of the scribbled notes, which turn out to be descriptions and dates, with photos pinned underneath of the levees’ massive honeycomb shapes. The pictures are grainy, but there is clearly no water in sight, and the honeycombs are cracked and smashed. Some have been pulled from the ground, leaving gaping holes in the line. 

“Some of these are from during the war,” Edyt says. “Others are more recent-you can see some repair work in this bottom one. It’s very different from what we’ve been told, however, only just started. There was a security cordon a kilometer back, and another a few kilometers outside of that. Barely managed to get as close as we did, but Pryderi Avenarius’s youngest daughter is one of the security team manning the inside cordon.”

“And I suppose she felt letting you in was her civic duty,” Shepard says loftily.

“No, she wants me to help with her residence permit,” Edyt says. “It’s a bit thorny. Too much paperwork, like everything on Palaven.”

Garrus can see Shepard about to launch into a defense of bureaucracy, and he hands her a granola bar to head it off. Shepard has all the social standing of a toddler, and Edyt is influential in the interior. It’s thorny itself: Shepard is Shepard, with all that comes with it, but she’s not even on the thirty-second citizenship tier, and she doesn’t send off any of a turian’s natural aggression signals. Her tones are too flat to mean anything. Edyt is more than halfway up the tiers, well-liked despite her personality deficits, and she is nearly always bristling with pheromones and dominant suffixes. It’s an excellent way for Shepard to end up in a ditch missing another limb. Garrus is beginning to regret bringing Shepard with him to the compound. 

In the blurry background of one of the photos, Garrus can make out a Reaper’s leg. In a more recent one, autos and chunks of rubble are piled up outside the levee wall, as if to get them out of the way. Nerves prickle along the back of his neck. 

“Part of the problem is how disorganized everything is,” Edyt says, taking a seat. “There are regional governors in a few places, and some tribal chiefs around. Who else to appeal to? There’s no Council anymore, and the Primarch is off-planet. We don’t even have an Ag Office Director to call in for backup.”

“Off-planet is functionally meaningless,” Shepard points out. Garrus notes, almost disturbed, how much more comfortable she is around Edyt, speaking English, than she was around Oxa, speaking Imperan, despite Edyt’s...well, despite everything about Edyt. “There’s space elevators all over this place. It’s not like he’s in another system. Also: extranet communication.”

“I know,” Edyt says, mandibles tightening. She even rolls her eyes. “It was an example only, Commander. Do you go to your President every time you find a crack in the sidewalk?”

“An ocean draining crack?” Shepard rubs her chin, deep in thought, and turns her hands palm upward. “I might.”

“No,” Edyt says. “You might write to your local councilman, and him to a legislator, and him to another legislator, and it escalates upward.”

Her tone implies that Shepard is something she’s scraped off her foot.

“And by then the whole Atlantic has drained into my backyard,” Shepard says, her tone getting sharper. 

“You begin to appreciate the situation,” Edyt says. 

“I can’t imagine you’d have heard,” Garrus says, and hunches a little when they both round on him. “The relay to Earth is up and running, Edyt.”

“Garrus,” Edyt says. “I understand you have been off-planet a long time, but do you truly feel the answer to this situation is importing water?”

“No,” Garrus says, and shrugs. He thinks of the exorbitant cost of shipping, and the gift he never ordered for Shepard. “But if you were thirsty enough, I bet you would.”

Edyt searches him visually for a long moment, before setting her mandibles and tilting her head. 

“You’ll stay here,” she says, sounding deeply displeased, though there is no sarcasm in her voice. “As you’re so intent on helping. Second room on the right. I’ll see you this afternoon. When Pryderi Avenarius comes by, tell her why you’re here.”

Edyt leaves, not running, but moving quickly. Garrus follows her out the door in time to see her vanish from the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. 

“Huh,” Shepard says, coming out of the room and looking down to the kitchen. They can faintly hear children yelling again. 

“Going to chat with Maccus Oran, I bet,” Garrus says. “Maybe she’ll come back with something good.”

He goes to the room Edyt mentioned, unsure if the ‘you’ included Shepard, but the room does have two beds. They’re turian-style, diverging from the decor of the entire compound, and Shepard blanches upon seeing the steps to the sleeping platform. Garrus steps aside so she can enter, and closes the door. He’s always been a little uncomfortable in rooms with open doors. Besides, Edyt could be gone for hours, and Shepard has barely slept.

“She knew the relay was up,” Shepard says the instant the door closes behind her. “She says ‘you’ll stay here’. She knows strange things about her neighbors. Can this cousin of yours see the future?”

“What?” Garrus asks, genuinely startled. Shepard is entirely serious. “She’s just a gossip.”

Shepard eyes him, and says, “Yeah, must be. Just a nosy old lady who knows a relay is working.”

“Shepard,” Garrus says gently. “How else would you have gotten here?”

Shepard scowls, but concedes the point. She slips onto the floor and the robot folds into itself, small enough for her to set on the floor beside her and lean on it. She rests her elbows on it and stretches her stumps out, sighing a little in relief, and squirms to crack her back. She has her stump socks on, but the strip of skin between those and her shorts is covered in hives.

“What is that from?” Garrus asks.

“Must be nickel in the robot,” Shepard says, and hikes her stump socks up.

“Ah,” Garrus says, no less confused.

“Why’d you let me handle the talking?” Shepard asks. She doesn’t look annoyed, and it’s encouraging. Garrus rolls his shoulders, unwilling to point out that he only rarely is in a position of control with Shepard around.

“Edyt and I don’t get along,” Garrus says. 

  
“I doubt anyone gets along with Edyt,” Shepard says. “You’re her cousin.”

“She respects you,” Garrus says, and considers this. “She tolerates you. And I trust you to ask what’s pertinent.”

“I had to ask her to clarify ninety percent of what she said,” Shepard deadpans. “You just didn’t want to get your mandible torn off.”

“That also,” Garrus admits. “She’s former hastatim. You know how you were telling me converts tend to be more enthusiastic?”

Shepard nods.

  
“Edyt is a convert to domestic life,” Garrus says. “The kitchen, the kids everywhere, the English, the sheep, gossiping with the neighbors. Spirits, the above-ground house with carpets. She’s mimicking, no substance at all, but she’s extremely enthusiastic about it.”

“And yet she doesn’t wear an apron,” Shepard says, and sighs theatrically. “This irenic thing. Not very common here, is it?”

“It is, actually,” Garrus says. 

“Some of us see the potential of your species, huh?” Shepard says, with a weird quirk to her mouth. “It’s such overkill to send you out here. This is a dime-a-dozen agricultural town with an axe to grind because their taxes were hiked. You’re...Garrus Vakarian.”

“I couldn’t help on Omega, Shepard. Here?” Garrus sits on the bottom step of one of the beds. “I’m not too arrogant to dig a well. Also, I think a town needs more than ten people.”

“What, are you planning to settle in the Cipritine backcountry? Dig some ditches and build a greenhouse? Does a town of ten need a village bobby?”

“Ah, well,” Garrus says, noting to himself to look up ‘village bobby’ later. “Do I strike you as a farmer?”

“Reminds me,” Shepard says. “Is there any other industry out here? At all? Or is it only variations on smallholdings and solar power?”

“Why, you planning your retirement hobbies? Of course there’s other things. Just not many.” Garrus laughs. “There’s a cobalt mine a little south of here. Some scientists drifting around. Mostly just people who moved out here to have a bunch of kids without a sanction or people sent out here for hard labor. A lot of times they stay-good tax rebate.”

“Turians pay taxes too,” Shepard muses.

“You really are the most absurdly ignorant person I’ve ever met,” Garrus says fondly, and laughs when she swats at him. “Really, though, that’s why they’re here. It’s big and empty and boring and the Hierarchy will pay them to fill it up. Easy money, I’d say.”

“Edyt too?” Shepard asks.

“I don’t know about Edyt,” Garrus says. “The compound has been here since I was a kid, and so has she. My mom used to bring me out here on school breaks. She did disappear during the war-like I said,  _ former _ hastatim-but she chose to live out here before I was born.”

“Hastatim,” Shepard repeats, the Imperan word round and awkward in her mouth. “Group of...group of what?”

“Execution squad,” Garrus says, then at her expression hastens to add, “Closest I can get in English, but that’s not really what they are. They take care of civilian militias.”

“Take care of,” Shepard repeats. “That’s fucking barbaric, Garrus. They’re execution squads.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he says. “It’s not an execution at all. They’re hard, sure, but they’re heroes.”

“How do they ‘take care’ of these militias in a way that’s  _ not _ utterly repulsive?”

“Ah,” Garrus says. “Well. Think about a hundred turians rising up against the Hierarchy. What are the chances they’d throw down their guns rather than be mowed down?”

“When was the last time the Hierarchy had an uprising?” Shepard demands.

“A few hundred years ago,” Garrus says. “They’re more like….police. Who also put down terrorists. Good for take-and-hold operations, too.”

“You’re backpedaling,” Shepard says. “That really doesn’t make the ‘indiscriminate murder of civilians’ part any better.”

“There aren’t any turian civilians, Shepard,” Garrus points out. “And it’s hardly indiscriminate. Hell, your own government put you on trial for indiscriminate murder of civilians.”

This he fails to say with the needed tone of sardonic lightness; he is truly shocked when Shepard doesn’t go apoplectic. 

“There is something  _ truly _ wrong with the way you people escalate,” Shepard says. Her voice is fairly normal, and she isn’t doing that awful blank stare. Maybe he did hit the right tone.

“Look, maybe Edyt can explain it better than I can,” Garrus says, troubled by her reaction. How else, when a turian would never surrender? The Unification War would still be going on. Indoctrinated turians would still be lobbing toilets out of buildings at passerby. The spirits of his ancestors would still be walking around on solid soil to curse him out for not setting up a shrine. Shepard gives him a squinting, suspicious look, like he’s pulling a prank, and drops it. He’s still bothered, anyway, but when he stretches his legs out she goes from leaning on the robot to leaning on his leg. It’s extremely uncomfortable, with his spur pinned to the floor. He doesn’t move away. 

“Hi,” he says. She eyes him for a moment, and the air grows a bit too still for his comfort. He still can’t tell if she’s angry or not. 

“Hi,” Shepard says. “You gross alien.”

He makes a little face at that one. It strikes a little too close to a sore spot. Sure, they talked about what happened after the Collector mission, for all the good it did. It’s like a riddle. What would a double amputee do to escape an alien she’s afraid of? Probably not go to his home planet, he supposes. He clicks a little, experimentally, and she does that reflexive repulsed flinch like when she sees a really large beetle, but she keeps her steady look. It’s probably his own fault she isn’t smiling at him, for mentioning Edyt’s hastatim days. 

“You’re basically deaf,” Garrus informs Shepard, handily changing the subject. Always putting his skills to good use. 

“Not that, too,” Shepard says. “Can I even work?”

“I don’t think so,” Garrus says. “You couldn’t hear half of what anyone was telling you to do.”

“Ah,” Shepard says. Something is a little off about her tone, but he can’t pin on what. “Then you do use infrasonic, and I’m going to write the linguistics paper of the year.”

“We do,” Garrus says. “It’s not a secret.”   
  


“Wait,” Shepard says, squinting at him again. “Is that why people keep ignoring me or talking to me in English?”

“That’s because your English accent is impenetrable,” Garrus says. “Also, you sound like a child without infrasonic. You’re never going to be the dominant one in a conversation.”

“It’s not an English accent, Garrus,” Shepard says, a bit waspish. “There’s like a hundred varieties of accents an English speaker can have.”

“Probably more than that,” Garrus says. “Luckily for you, I understand you because I’m used to your horrible language now.”

“It’s not horrible!”

“My English accent is significantly better than your Imperan or Qotu,” Garrus points out. “And I have to use an extra throat for it.”

Shepard says, “Garrus, are you purposely finding things to make fun of me for so that I don’t feel out of place here?”

“No,” he says.

“You are,” Shepard says. “Cut it out.”

Garrus rolls his shoulders. “It’s better than your ‘Earth-warming party’.”

“It’s information you needed,” Shepard insists.

“Why would I need to know there’s no muscles in your fingers?” Garrus demands. 

“It was just a brochure,” Shepard says. “I got it at the spaceport, too. And there was snacks. It was a party.”

“A party of us and the trash pickup guy,” Garrus says. 

“He does important work,” Shepard says.

“Yeah, alright,” Garrus says, still bemused by the concept of a ‘trash pickup guy’. Then again, humans don’t turn their atmospheric carbon into fuel. He’s rarely surprised when they’re backwards. He’ll give it a few weeks, though; Palaven eventually, always, starts to feel like the strangling prison of his childhood.

The patina always takes some time to wear off. It follows the same pattern every few years: he starts to miss home, takes a visit, enjoys the sun and seeing his mother, he does some work around the apartment. He shrugs off all the weights on his shoulders. He gets used to wearing fabric pants instead of metal. Then the chafing starts. Papers start getting tacked to the door reminding that new residents must register with the district. Relatives converge to encourage him to join a committee, or volunteer with the children, or reenlist and take his full citizenship back up. The irritation builds like a static charge. Somewhere around the thirtieth committee invitation, he loses it and leaves before his original flight is scheduled. His father sends him a cool, cordial extranet goodbye. 

Each visit he’s been more and more mangled, and this time he doesn’t even have someone to confide in. That nightmare two years at the end of the war and on Earth are rot festering in his insides he doesn’t know how to scrape out. The details are what haunt him, crowding out the backdrop of constant fear and Reaper bugling. The dim little sun. The rain, the fogs. The enormous variety of insects. Shepard’s oblivious, dogged misery. Langenauer’s constant incursions in a space that barely felt like his, nevermind safe. He carries it all, every moment of the day. There are no weights he can shrug off this time. The side of his face is the most visible, but who’s to say the rot in his insides isn’t worse? 

And, well. Well. Shepard lays on a turian bed, covered in hives, swearing and yelping and itching, but not swallowing cyanide capsules. His seizure monitor blinks in a slow pattern that somehow means he isn’t about to have a seizure. His least welcoming cousin has vanished to bring about the required neighborhood interrogation. Nothing is crawling on the walls or the floor; somewhere in the kitchen below is food he can eat without second thought. The salt flats glitter in the sun. All in all, it could be worse. 

“It’s gotta be the fucking sunscreen,” Shepard says. 

“You’re going to draw blood,” Garrus says, mildly interested. “I don’t know what’s going on there, but it looks unpleasant.”

“It’s my skin,” Shepard says. “It hates this planet. It hates your sunscreen.”

“Why is it swollen?” he asks, sitting on the edge of the bed, noticing absently that it doesn’t crumple his spurs like Shepard’s couch does. He prods one of the hives, and Shepard yelps and swats at him. “Wait a minute. This is a normal thing for you?”

“Yes,” Shepard says, scowling at him. “I’m allergic to nickel and perfumes and a slew of other incredibly minor, common things. You’ve seen it before.”

“I just figured,” Garrus says and pauses, works his mandibles for a moment, and continues, “Well, I just figured it was a fungal condition you had.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Shepard says. “At least I have an internal skeleton.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Garrus says, and waves this away. “So Mordin wasn’t  _ completely _ wrong when he said you were allergic to me.”

Shepard’s eyebrows lift at this, but she doesn’t question this. It’s probably for the better. He’s long since decided there’s no value in dwelling, and if she doesn’t remember being covered in those hives head to toe he isn’t going to remind her. 

“The only thing worse than you trying to make me feel better is when you stop trying to make me feel better,” Shepard informs him. 

“Sorry,” he says. Surely the fury is coming now. 

“You clumsy asshole,” Shepard says. Now he sees it, even worse than the anger he’s looking for. Her lip is twitching. She’s contracted, but not tense, like her blood is all drying up inside her. 

Shepard’s  _ hurt _ . 

“Shit,” Garrus says. “Shit.”

The grand scale of everything that’s happened has worked a sort of alchemy. Everything is world-ending, legendary, mythic heroes. He’d forgotten, somehow, that he could just hurt someone’s feelings. Too many years of bloodshed. Too many hours with a targeting scope. Shepard is swimming in neurosis and instability; Garrus is mired in fear and resentment. In navigating it all, he’s lost sight of her simply being...his friend.

She doesn’t cry, of course, and she lets him stay on the edge of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he says eventually, when there’s some color in her face again. 

“It’s better for both of our emotional well-being if we don’t talk about charged topics in a flippant manner,” Shepard says. “Sorry. That’s therapy talking. I’m trying not to give a shit. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

  
“It was stunningly insensitive of me,” Garrus agrees. With effort, he doesn’t qualify this. No ‘buts’ to make himself feel better. He can listen to therapy talk, too. Would he have bothered before the war? Probably not. Then again, he never would have even made a joke implying Shepard did something wrong, all that lifetime ago. “It felt personal, so I built a bridge too far.”

He can see Shepard mouthing ‘built a bridge too far’ with her eyebrows pinched together. 

“I will try not to see your criticisms as speciesist and a personal affront,” Garrus says formally, with great effort. Privately, he still thinks the fuss over hastatim absurd if not stupid, but that’s aliens.

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t really think I committed indiscriminate murder of civilians,” Shepard says. “This time. Only this time. Don’t you dare say that again.”

On reflection, Garrus finds the rot in his insides to be the worst of it. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the chap being on the shorter side, but it's mostly groundlaying

Garrus wakes before dawn, hideously, desperately thirsty. He can faintly hear bloodwhippers hooting outside, but it’s too early for anything else to be making much noise. He makes his slow, sleepy way down the stairs and stops in the doorway, startled beyond all reason, but too braindead to actually greet Shepard. She is in the kitchen with a sleeping turian child at her feet and a datapad propped upon the table before her. Shepard turns like a machine at his shuffling, torso and shoulders and head all moving in one stiff motion.

“ _ Grithur _ ,” Shepard says, upon making eye contact. Her eyes are swollen-red the whole way around. She’s got her radiation jacket draped over her lap. 

Garrus repeats, “Grithur.”

“This,” Shepard says, prodding the datapad with her finger. Garrus lurches to the table and sits, squinting at the screen. 

 

Avenarius, Vygdis

  1. born 2156/08/99



2180/10 marriage submitted; Oran, Deciem

2181/11 child registered; Avenarius, Metaene

2182/04 child registered; Avenarius, Sionine 

2182/05 public intoxication, released

2182/08 appeal 1, re:marriage; submitted

2182/08 appeal 1, re:marriage; denied

2183/13 marriage recorded; Oran, Deciem

2183/14 marriage dissolved; Oran, Deciem

2183/17 appeal 2 submitted, re: marriage; pending

 

The lines scroll on for several more pages. Garrus sorts through it, glazed over, and tilts his head to look at Shepard.

“Residence record,” he says. “Doing Edyt’s paperwork?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Shepard says.

“Can you read it?” he asks.

“No,” Shepard says. “Anicetus down there’s been helping me.”

“Sure,” Garrus says blearily. “You love paperwork.”

“It’s my analytical mind,” Shepard says. “Also, I’ve had stimulants and a cup of coffee. I’m going to be awake for the next three days.”

“Okay,” Garrus says, and gets a cup of water. He dozes off after sitting back down, though he can dimly hear Shepard tapping away on the tablet. Eventually, he stirs himself enough to say, “You took stimulants to do paperwork?”

“No,” Shepard says.

“Oh,” Garrus says, and slides headfirst back into dozing, this time facedown on the table. The kitchen is still cool from the dark, and Shepard has the shutters fastened. He sleeps for hours, and wakes with a stiff back. Shepard is still hunched in her seat. The child is long gone. It doesn’t look like anything else has been moved or looked at, like the air is so still it’s gathering dust. 

“Did you barricade the kitchen?” Garrus croaks. 

“You sound like shit,” Shepard says. “Didn’t barricade anything. Just no one wants to come in here with the crazy people.”

“I feel like shit,” he says. 

“Poor thing,” Shepard says, with a snort, but she pats his arm and lets her hand linger a little. “I’d get you a blanket if everything in this bastard house wasn’t three feet out of my reach.”

“Don’t really want a blanket,” Garrus says, and yawns. He’s picked that one up from her, but unlike his pantomiming of winking and smiling, yawning is somehow thoughtless for him. In a quick mouthful of words, he blurts,  “Can we sleep in the same bed again, or would that be weird?”

“Probably wouldn’t be weird,” Shepard says. “And you know the word sleep is functionally meaningless for me.”

“Good thing you don’t take up much space,” Garrus says, and immediately winces. 

“Fucked up,” Shepard says. “I’ll sleep in the bed and you can sleep on the floor.”

“Some vacation this is,” Garrus says. “I’ll never hire you to plan my trips.”

“Whatever will I do with my new career as a travel agent,” Shepard deadpans.

“We have those, too,” Garrus says. “But we call them decade commanders, mostly.”

“Think they have a uniform that would fit me? On the top half?”

“It would look  _ terrible _ ,” Garrus informs her. Shepard barks a laugh and goes back to her paperwork. Vygdis Avenarius has attempted legally recording her marriage twice in thirteen years local-time. Somehow this has resulted in being ‘appealed’ and ‘dissolved’; turians love their bureaucracy, but surely some clerk can’t stamp DIVORCE on a marriage license and make it so, like god declaring the existence of fiat currency and cloven hooves.

“How do turians get married?” Shepard asks, without preamble, and Garrus chokes more than a little on his cup of water.

“We go to the civil parson and join households,” Garrus says, after hacking out a lungful. “There’s nine different kinds of that, though.”

“Nine,” Shepard muses. “Sounds like a pain in the ass.”

“Three of them are...more forms of adoption,” Garrus says. “The rest, well, it’s legal or religious or spiritual or whatever.”

“I bet there’s a form for people who have blood grudges,” Shepard says.

“Six,” Garrus says promptly.

“Relatives?”

“Romantic or civil?”

“Oh,” Shepard says, and her eyebrows pull together. 

“Seven and seven-point-three,” he says. “Some marriages are more binding than others, eh?”

She doesn’t ask about aliens, sidestepping the elephant in the room and probably making it more noticeable. 

“Is someone still married if they can’t record it with the parson?”

“Sort of,” he says. “I’ve never been married, the process is a bit obscure for me. They’re still married, but there’s no inheritance rights, or medical visitation, and their pay and housing don’t change. It’s not really great for the kids, socially, either. They fall into a whole different category because there’s only one person on record supporting them.”

“That’s incredibly stupid,” Shepard tells him. “What if the parson just doesn’t like the situation? Seems ripe for abuse.”

“Well, it safeguards minors from being forced into marriage, because they don’t have a spouse that can make decisions for them,” Garrus says. “Happened to a friend of mine. She was fourteen. Wealthy family, no other heir, and not in basic, obviously. Very gentle girl, not really what you’d expect. So they got her married to keep her out of basic, but the parson didn’t like the idea. So. Not legally married, and there was an accident-her spouse probably would have left her for dead, but she wasn’t an adult. No living will, so they brought her back.”

“Did the spouse go to prison for attempted murder?”

“Oh, yes,” Garrus says, with a bloodthirsty glint in his eye. “My father was on the tribunal. That bastard will rot in a cell for the rest of his miserable life. You think the interior is bad? Imagine the equator.”

“Still, Vygdis Avenarius has appealed the parson and it got her marriage dissolved, instead,” Shepard says. 

“Sometimes that happens. Like I said, it’s mostly a mystery to me.”   
“If no one gossips about it, Garrus doesn’t know about it,” Shepard says with a sigh. 

“Probably why she can’t change her residence permit,” Garrus says. “She has no grounding for it. Pretty strict categories to choose from. Her spouse is, uh, let me think, Deciem Oran, right?”

“You really have a nose for the drama of the interior,” Shepard says.

“Ah, well, Vygdis and I are cousins,” Garrus says. “I’ve known her a long time. And Deciem is a good man, but he was living in Cipritine last I heard. And they have kids. It’s a hike to be raising kids.”

“So if the parson won’t let them register the marriage, Vygdis and the kids are stuck out here,” Shepard says. “Is that bad for them socially, too?”

“It’s not great,” Garrus admits. “On the other hand, the interior is the only place in this part of Palaven that didn’t get smashed into dirt.”

“Because there’s nothing else?” Shepard asks.   
“No,” Garrus says. “Most of it is just underground.”

“That’s how Maccus siphons the water allotment, isn’t it? Because Deciem is in Cipritine?”

“Yes,” Garrus says. “Probably. But it should have been revoked when his residence permit was changed.”

“Huh,” Shepard says, and bends her head to the tablet again. There are too many pages in this for that to be the end of it. Changes have to be sealed by a registrar. There has to be a name or a reason somewhere here. 

Palaven is not the worst place Shepard has ever been, she’ll give it that much. That honor goes to the offal pit the Citadel became. The interior, though, is mind-numbing. At first it’s even quite exotic, in the way that a beautiful bit of glacier is perfect for a photograph; everywhere she looks Shepard can metaphorically frame the shot in her mind. The sky is so vast and empty of clouds it might go on forever. The heat is dry, so it isn’t too hard on her temperature-controlled-ship-adjusted skin, though it’s a good thirty degrees above what she’s used to. The wildlife doesn’t spook her. Even the insects are friendlier, like big glittering jewels.

On the other hand, Shepard learns very, very quickly there is no paroxetine on Palaven. Nor guanfacine, or the occasional quetiapine, nor the psychiatrist monitor the potential interaction. Shepard is an adventurous woman, or used to be, but she doesn’t think she’s up for navigating the turian healthcare system and starting a turian antipsychotic. Therapy in the space age, she thinks with a vicious snort. Take your human medical bureaucracy and toss another species in front of it. Surely turians have turian antipsychotics; time to get familiar with the turian controlled drug classes.

She hadn’t expected the infrastructure, the wobbly scaffolding, of her medical system to exist on Palaven, or at least she hadn’t really thought about it. She wishes she had. 

Or at least filled the fucking prescriptions before haring off.

“I don’t know what that is,” Garrus says politely, when she mentions the controlled drug classes, mostly as a joke, but also genuinely worried, during her next break from the tablet. She rattles the pill bottle in her hand at him.

“You don’t do limited prescriptions of medications?” Shepard demands. “Keep track of who gets how much of what?”

“No,” Garrus says, looking increasingly bewildered. “Why would we need to?”

“I can just go into a pharmacy and ask for the good shit?” Shepard asks.

“No,” Garrus says. “What’s a pharmacy? And you’d have to talk to a medic, first. We aren’t asari. We have standards.”

“I’m in hell,” Shepard says. “I have three paroxetine tablets left.”

“Are you going to die?” Garrus asks, though he sounds more interested than worried. 

“No,” Shepard says. “I’m just going to puke like a hydrant. And then lose the sole fragile remnant of my sanity.”

Truthfully, it feels even more dramatic to bring it up to another person, but mental stability aside,  a small but important part of her self-pride comes from being one of the two people in the program that’s consistently compliant, and that sours her mood more. And, of course, there’s the fact that she wants to suck-start a shotgun twenty-three hours a day. 

She circles, briefly, around an idea that yanks at her neck like a noose: only somewhat is she out of the worst of things. There is three more days of that progress before it’s yanked from under her feet. Her irritation stokes into something like fear. She sees the clone, the lump of meat on the Reaper’s deck, done while she had some semblance of self-control. At least without legs she can’t chase someone down and murder them if she snaps. 

“Well,” Shepard says, before Garrus can respond. “I’m probably going to...get worse. Much worse.”

“So you might die,” Garrus says.

“That sounded remarkably steady,” Shepard says. “You’ve made so much progress.”

“I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that your sense of humor is so morbid,” Garrus says. His mandibles are high and tight, but in a way that reads more stressed than upset. 

“I was thinking without legs I’m less dangerous,” Shepard says slowly, “But that’s not really true, is it? I’m a biotic. I’m always armed.”

The angle of Garrus’ mandibles narrows sharply, but he doesn’t otherwise show a reaction. 

“It’s been a while,” Garrus says. “Maybe your brain has-stopped being crazy.”

“My, Garrus,” Shepard says. “I wish I’d thought of that one.”

“Oh, don’t be an asshole,” he says. 

“Sorry,” Shepard says. “But have you stopped being crazy? No? Then don’t say that kind of garbage.”

“Rogue biotics are an unsettling concept for turians,” Garrus says, by way of apology.

“Not rogue so much as delusional,” Shepard says. “Maybe the Alliance ship in Cipritine will have something, if we get back that way anytime soon.”

“And if you don’t get arrested,” Garrus points out. “Court martial is probably still lingering.”

“I sent an email to Graene this morning,” Shepard says, reminded. “She said my legs aren’t anywhere near fixed. So I guess I won’t be outrunning the long arm of the law anytime soon.”

“Well, if we’re driving to Cipritine we might as well wait and do both at the same time,” Garrus says. “If you can wait without ripping your throat out. See if she's heard anything about the court martial, too.”

“Already in there, but I’ll see if she has a time estimate. Shall I have her tell EDI you say hello?” Shepard asks. “I know how you feel about AI, but she’s having a rough time of it.”

“Of course,” Garrus says, without the briefest hesitation, and it wrings a grin out of her. 

  
  



	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings continue to be in full effect folks

Not hanging, for starters. Nor burning, nor poison. Not drowning. Not choking. Not anaphylaxis. Not spacing. No overdose, if she could get ahold of something to overdose on. 

The possibilities get increasingly unappealing as her list goes on. Shooting. Cutting her throat. Throwing herself out of the jeep at high speed. Crashing the jeep. Starving. Heatstroke. Grisly. Painful-she’s changed her stance on blowing her head off. Medical intervention too easily accessible. Equipment difficult to acquire. How can it be so hard to kill herself? She only has three quarters of a fucking body. She would laugh, if she could. There isn’t even enough fucking water on this planet to lay face-down in a puddle. 

Indestructible, bulletproof, wired and plated and bolted. Shepard has taken on a geth Prime nearly bare-handed. Nothing on Palaven is going to smash her skull in. There is never a way out for Shepard. 

Three days, she’d been hoping for, but there isn’t even that. The pill bottle rattles, but there’s only pebbles inside, swapped out by nosy turian children who’ve never seen a childproof bottle. She picks at the skin of her cuticles. She has no reason to believe this is medication withdrawal, and every reason to believe it’s stress. That doesn’t help. Sooner or later she’ll move from cuticles to her eyebrows. The anticipation of the crisis might be worse than the actual crisis. It likely is, given that she knows any real recurrence of symptoms won’t happen for weeks. The smallest of mercies is that she has no real responsibilities on Palaven. She isn’t going to flake off of a work day or crash a car during a flashback or spend days on end in bed rather than bathe, if only because there’s nowhere to really bathe. 

She feels dirty, too, nine days in the backcountry scrubbing with sand and washing her hair in the sink while a dozen turian children stare openly. She vomits from the withdrawal, and, well, it’s not how she would have expected to remember she can’t kneel. She yawns, jaw-crackingly wide, and winces. She has a toothbrush, but where it’s gone is a mystery. Garrus at least knows the score; he’s taken rugs out of the rooms she goes into, moves wires, opens doors like a butler. Between him and the robot dog she gets around alright. 

She’s made no progress on the mystery of Vygdis Avenarius, and Edyt’s threatened welcoming committee has yet to materialize. Frankly, she’s seen little more than dirty footprints from Edyt in the last few days, and a hell of a lot of blank stone walls and tablet screens. Turians decorate, but it’s all a bit esoteric. Edyt’s famed sheep are long dead, though a few sun-bleached bones are displayed on shelves. A few glass balls hang from the ceiling in what Shepard assumes is a living room. Shepard had pictured more guns and bloody teeth in display cases. 

Edyt is an irenic, allegedly, but Shepard can’t quite get a handle around the idea of hastatim. From a distance all of Palaven looks the same to an alien, just a big bloodstain on the map of the universe. Generalities are always easy: humans build elaborate bureaucracies to acquire tax money, asari strippers have breasts despite not being mammals, batarians spice their meals with oleander. For the vast majority there’s no need to look deeper. Hastatim sound like a bad joke, like the vorcha navy or the diplomatic incident at Shanxi. The idea of positive benefit from rounding up civilians is repulsive. 

And yet, would she have expected turian pacifists at all? Graene and Edyt both lay claim to the title, with different reasoning. Does Edyt having blood on her hands wash that out?

Earth has a long history of disaster. Price hikes on AIDS medications, death camps, bursting levees, bees dropping in the fields, people passing phone numbers for human smugglers hand to hand like bucket brigades through war zones. Phones go dead. Windows go dark. Streets are empty, the buildings smashed. Humanity washing ashore.

Shepard has blood on her hands. She can’t bring herself to believe that keeps a person from wanting better things for others. She prods listlessly at the tablet screen, swiping out of Vygdis Avenarius’ census records for the fifth time, and closes out the translation screen on her omnitool just as it beeps with an incoming ping. She swipes it out twice before she gives in and answers. 

“Am I interrupting breakfast?” Graene asks. She’s smiling, a tiny bit, barely a smirk. Shepard snaps a yeast candy between her teeth and swallows the sweet dust. 

“No,” Shepard says, and crunches another candy into bits. “I do this most of the time, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“I assume that is normal for biotics,” Graene says. 

“For me?” Shepard says. “Yes.”

“Well, you only have so much food,” Graene says, like Shepard might have forgotten.

“Did you call to harangue my calorie intake?” Shepard asks.

“No,” Graene says. “The monitor is broken.”

“Oh,” Shepard says, and sets the tablet down. “Let me get the big guy in here.”

Garrus is grouchy, tired, groggy, like always lately, and he grumbles the whole way to the table and grumbles some more when Shepard gives him the tablet. 

“Stop being a shit,” Shepard tells him, and he moves his mandibles into an unsettling rictus that she assumes is sarcastic. 

“Catch me up so I can go back to bed,” Garrus says. It really is inhumanely early, but Shepard has very little sympathy. She’s the one who can’t even take a piss without help. 

“Your monitor is broken, we think,” Graene says, without preamble, like greeting Shepard has used up all of her social skills. Then again, Shepard thinks, this is a turian tablet, which presumably has some kind of way of transmitting the parts of turian speech she can’t perceive. “It’s been throwing off almost constant alarms the entire time you’ve been gone.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of seizures,” Garrus says. 

“Possible seizures,” Graene says, and shrugs. “So a neurologist I’m not.”

“I suppose it could have worn off by now,” Shepard says. 

“What, like your problem did?” Garrus points out. 

“Maybe there’s a difference between a brain chemistry problem and a medical problem you picked up from some native wildlife,” Shepard says, a bit acidly. She pictures the native wildlife in question, the malignant parasites heaving on its skin. She doesn’t have burns on her ears from the molten earbugs, but she can still feel it. 

“I got slammed around in the shuttle,” Garrus muses. “Maybe it’s brain damage.”

They both laugh at this and Graene holds her uncomfortable silence just a touch too long before she also laughs.

“Oh, the metal content,” Shepard says. “Pulled that one right out of my ass.”

“We know,” Graene says. 

“I have a question,” Garrus says.

“I’m not giving you dating advice,” Graene says suspiciously. “Stop asking.”

“It’s about my brain damage,” Garrus says, with brittle dignity. Shepard winces in mocking sympathy. 

“Find a doctor, Vakarian,” Graene says. 

“My alien roommate’s physical therapist isn’t good enough?” Garrus demands.

“It shouldn’t be,” Graene says. 

“Just spitballing here,” Shepard says. “Are house calls a thing on this planet? The doctor comes to you.”

“Very convenient,” Garrus says. “Probably the smartest thing you people have come up with. Not a thing on this planet.”

“Are hospitals?” Shepard asks.

“No,” Garrus says. Shepard nods. 

“You’re fucking with me,” she says.

“Yeah, a little bit,” Garrus says. “Look, there hasn’t been any trouble since we left. I really think it’s over with.”

“Realistically, we both know that’s unlikely,” Graene says.

“Not at all,” Garrus says, and shrugs, but only with his forearms, and ticks off his reasoning on his fingers. “The seizures only happened there. What would I run into on Palaven? Shepard would have seen if there was anything recently, and if the monitor is broken it won’t be accurate.”

“Untrue,” Shepard says, and when Garrus turns she shoves his arm. “Quit looming over me. I sleep! I don’t keep seizure watch all night.”

“You sleep at the same time?” Graene asks, diverted. “Do you piss together, too? How sweet.”

“Oh, shove off,” Shepard says. 

“She means it,” Garrus says, sighing, and from the way his horrible rictus grin widens she knows he’s praying she doesn’t question that. 

“Is this a vulnerability thing?” she asks.

“Yes,” Graene says. 

“There is something terribly wrong with your species if pissing together is a romantic expression of trust and vulnerability,” Shepard says. When both turians look at her, she adds, “The primate in the room is also an apex predator, assholes.”

“Apex predator, therefore xenosociologist,” Garrus says, and she laughs. He yawns once, massively, with a quick snap of teeth like a cat.

“Are you that tired?” Shepard asks. “Go back to sleep.”

“I want to go home and watch my soap operas,” Garrus says. “Thanks for the update, Graene. Keep in touch. Say hello to EDI and Ayelet for me?”

“Of course,” Graene says, and she and Shepard watch him slog back up the stairs. 

“Is there a reason you’re hanging out in the entryway of the house?” Graene asks, idly, because Shepard is visibly itching to follow Garrus and interrogate him about bathroom customs and the poor bastard deserves a break. 

“This is the only chair I can reach,” Shepard says. “Hey, is the synthesizer working at all?”

“Yes,” Graene says. “Ah-your medication. I”ll talk to Ayelet. We have a medic. I think.”

“Thank you,” Shepard says, and feels a little prickling in her eyes that might be tears and might be stress. She doesn’t think about it very hard.

SHIP

Turians work their prosthetics on a level so far removed from human technical abilities as to be unthinkable. Graene will not touch Shepard’s prosthetics, and Ayelet will not force her, and it has been a long time since she worked on something with so many foreign pieces alone. She remembers enough, surely, to sort out the pins and bolts, but this is not her line of work. 

Stubbies, or even an athlete’s blades, would be far easier to repair or make anew than the big full-length legs. With a few more inches of thigh, a knee joint, she could scrape by with hardwood and plant fiber. Ayelet sits on a stool aboard ship, left prosthetic in front of her, and wants to weep. 

The deadened gel is only the smallest issue; Shepard can certainly strap the legs on instead, but without the nerve impulses she will be strapping on a hundred pounds of deadweight. All the long plates of shin and calf and thigh are crumpled and bent, like a smashed up can. Ayelet could straighten them out with a hydraulic press, pick out all the wires and insulation, piece it all back together. She could perhaps even recast the metal, source local parts, hire it out to a turian firm. Graene could surely find one, likely would. 

And yet she cannot bring herself to reach out and touch the lump of scrap in front of her and mold it into something new. And she cannot bring herself to hand them over, either. Perhaps this is only what Shepard deserves. The legs are in this condition from her mad suicide ram. 

This feels like a poor justification, and she ignores it. She was not harmed badly in the crash, and neither was Graene. They both have some bruising, and Graene knocked her shoulder. Hardly enough injury to call for blood money. Ayelet is rarely sure if she even likes Shepard, but Shepard deserves the courtesy she’d give any other person who needed her help. Thus: Shepard has insurance, and Ayelet will bill it a ludicrous amount, and it will be paid without question, and so she has little reason to consider the circumstances of the damage. 

For a moment she quails, thinking of the circumstances in question, and pulls her stool a bit further from the table. She will not hold Shepard responsible any more than she would someone in a car accident. 

She keeps telling herself this. And any minute now, she will reach out and begin. Just to make a list of what needs to be done. Just to pick a fleck of enamel off the shin. Blow a bit of dust off the heel up-thrust to the sky. 

Hell, she might even get up and toss another ten minutes on the physiotherapy courses she’s started. She wonders if Shepard is keeping up with her exercises. Unlikely-she knows Ayelet isn’t a physiotherapist. Ayelet can test a limb’s working, but she has no real expert’s authority with Shepard. Well, and it’s only been a handful of days. Hardly earth-shaking. Hardly muscle-shrinking. 

Strange, considering that the largest fraction of Shepard’s mobility is cupped in her or Graene’s hands. Plenty of amputees prefer a wheelchair-Ayelet has referred several of them herself-and on cosmopolitan Palaven it would be easy enough to find a human-standard wheelchair with a bit of work.

Well, and Shepard doesn’t fly, and she doesn’t crawl, either, and Ayelet does get to her feet, but only to leave the dim little room. Her legs move up and down as they should. She grasps the lintel on the way out, flexing each finger before she lifts it.

Ayelet doesn’t lack appreciation for her gifts, or for the things life hasn’t taken from her. She has much more appreciation for the things that have come to her through no work of her own, for the delight of the surprise.

The great mystery: what life takes, and what life does not take. Even continents move. Even stars die. 

In the face of instability, it is nearly always the disabled that suffer most. Ayelet has seen it, though not often; she is not one of the soldiers that carry the dementia patients’ bodies from the flooded ward, or the nurses unhooking empty saline bags after the power has gone out for good. It is more at a remove: bureaucracy forcing a child to go without mobility.

She is thankful for this, but it saps her credibility. It makes it hard to explain, when words are already difficult for her. Some things are understandable, by dint of her profession. Of course she would expect all doorways wide enough for a wheelchair. That she would suggest an omnitool alert for escalator outages? That begs explanation of how an escalator outage is worth the same alert system used for flash floods and terrorist attacks. Well, no, she will say, not nearly the same thing, don’t put words in my mouth. And yet when they continue she lets them, and drops it.

The sickness of it is that others putting words in her mouth is often the only way they get there. The importance is lost by having to make that justification, that reduction, to another person. Without fail her point is made into an absurdity through exaggeration. Ayelet finds it impressive how universal the skill is. 

If she experienced the fear of being trapped in place, of stairs, of cobblestones, of the gap between station platform and train-perhaps she could explain. Perhaps she could tell Graene why she is so alarmed by the corpse on the cot. 

Removed from a body, prosthetic limbs take on a patina. No movement to it, no life; a small monument to life’s triumph over injury. Still, even the best covering is recognizably not flesh and does not pretend to be.

Graene and the person, EDI, the robot, Ayelet skips and trips every time she thinks of the thing on the cot, are both in the rec room. Little else on this ship shows any signs of life. The marines avoid them all. Ayelet does not mind. She has spent enough time around Alliance personnel in her day. The uniforms will surely give her hives. 

The thing, the robot, EDI, the thing on the cot, is still on her cot. Ayelet allows, tries to allow, her gaze to slide right past without forming a real thought about it. A thought about her. The rictus of its face is somewhat relaxed, and it is looking directly at Ayelet. 

EDI is like a sore Ayelet cannot stop touching. It is horrid, all over, the sutures, the stiff meat, the lump of the implant hanging off the neck like a tumor. She cannot stop thinking about ripping out the implant. It is like a scab. 

Something must be up in that skull. Still, EDI does not blink, or Ayelet has never seen her blink. Troubling all over. Like an insect writhing under a rock. 

“The legs are unsalvageable,” Ayelet says, into the dead air. Graene looks up from the tablet in her hands and sets the tablet on the table. It keeps piping a jaunty jingle. 

“I felt as much,” Graene says, her gaze flat, like she is daring Ayelet to challenge her. Ayelet does not, as she hopes Graene would not for her. 

“Still, it does bring up the question of replacements,” Ayelet says. She does not relish the conversation she will have with Shepard. She has even less enjoyment in the guilt beginning to prod her conscience. 

“It does not,” EDI, the robot, the corpse, drones. She jerks all over once like a horse shaking a fly, but the marine’s donated painkillers must be helping. Ayelet would wish for a synthesizer on this ship, like one the on the ship that brought them from Earth, if it were for anyone else.

“You feel Shepard should walk on her stumps?” Ayelet asks. “The turians do, in fact, have wheelchair analogues.”

“No,” EDI says, and jerks again. After a moment of demented gasping for air, she continues, “Fix them.”

“I cannot,” Ayelet says. Graene does not say, I will not, but her mandibles are held very tight to her jaw.

“Needs them,” EDI says, clearer now. She lifts her head and looks Ayelet full in the face, though her mouth is twitching from the pain. 

“You are being absurd,” Ayelet says. “Please lay back down.”

“Fix them,” EDI says again. Her mouth opens and closes like a fish. Ayelet shudders all over. 

“They’re scrap,” Graene says. EDI groans. Graene, as if doused in gasoline, leaps for the tablet, swipes through, and jams it into the corpse’s hands.

“Type it,” Graene says. “Type it out, EDI. Why does she need them so badly?”

Oh, the drama, Ayelet is thinking. She would be shamed by Graene’s consideration if she didn’t suspect it was only to make EDI stop talking. She suspects strongly, also, that EDI cannot write.

“Clone,” EDI says and lets the tablet fall from her hands. 

“Shit,” Graene says.

“The clone is dead,” Ayelet says, and does not continue with ‘or abandoned on a dead ship’ or any of the other unpleasant scenarios she can think of. She does not pity Shepard’s clone, but there are no good ways to die in space. 

“You’re fidgeting,” Graene says, and Ayelet brings her hands down from the edge of her scarf. She knows without looking it covers all of her hair. And between herself, the alien, and the corpse on the table, there are no men in the room. And she’ll pick all the threads loose if she isn’t careful, too, because this one is muslin gauze. She still has to put her hands in her pockets to keep them from wandering back up.

“Clone,” EDI says again. She coughs, and then again before Ayelet realizes she’s saying “Erszbat” in a human voice trying to be a batarian’s voice. It’s not the accent, it’s that the Normandy could reproduce voices that evolved without a larynx. The implant heaves when she does it, like it would tear free of the skin.

“The clone came from Erszbat?” Ayelet asks. 

“Batarians don’t have the electricity to keep their kids’ lesson access running, nevermind cloning labs,” Graene says. Graene, the turian, whose concept of poverty starts and ends at computer access. It wrenches Ayelet’s heart the tiniest bit. It would never be appropriate to say she finds it sweet, but...she does find it a bit sweet. She’s seen children die from diarrhea. After all the things Graene has seen in the galaxy, some fragment of her comparatively wealthy, stable, developed culture hasn’t been hammered out of her. 

“No,” EDI says, sounding increasingly aggravated, implant jerking and wobbling, and Ayelet’s nerve breaks like a colt. 

“Stop it,” she says, not shouting, not angry, no real change in her tone, but her hands are shaking. “You are being absurd. That clone is dead.”

The histrionics from a being that hasn’t even mastered tear ducts are the biggest indignity in a long string. She cannot look at the thing on the cot anymore, pallid and weeping in silence, mouth gaping like a gutted fish. She bolts, and EDI says no more.


	5. Chapter 5

Ayelet is standing over Shepard’s prosthetics by the time Graene finds her. Her face is tight and blank, which is not unusual for Ayelet, and Graene wants to ask what that was about. Ayelet is not the steadiest person Graene knows, but she doesn’t generally bolt like a kid in boot camp on their first furlough.

“Where’s the synthesizer on a ship like this?” she asks instead. She’s never spent much time on human ships. Ayelet knows only a little more than she does, but Ayelet also likely would have come across it. Graene’s been moldering with EDI, who is in no condition to explore. (Can a corpse get lonely? Only if the computer inside it can.)

“There isn’t one.”

“I told Shepard it was working,” Graene says.

“You shouldn’t have,” Ayelet says, teeth clipping the sounds neatly.

“Unfortunate,” Graene says, and sighs. It sounds more peculiar to herself than usual. (No translation microbes. When has she ever needed them here?)

“These ships don’t normally travel long enough to need one,” Ayelet says. 

“We have a little problem then,” Graene says. “Shepard’s out of medication.”

“What does she take?” Ayelet asks, and then shakes her head. “Pointless question. What I meant to ask is, what does she want us to do about it?”

“The synthesizer,” Graene says. “There isn’t going to be anywhere in Cipritine that sells human medication.”

“No,” Ayelet says, “Not that sort of medication. Well, she’ll adjust or she won’t.”

Graene’s empathy runs on different wavelengths than Ayelet’s does, she knows, but Ayelet is right. If Shepard were turian she could reach out into the community for support, if not medication, but the best Shepard has is Vakarian’s mother-cousin. She has Vakarian, too, of course, for what good that does. (When you don’t have a hammer, you don’t want anything to look like a nail.)

“Nothing for it, then,” Graene says. Shepard’s bewildering array of pills aside, there is something particularly human about the issue. They’re so insistent on pharmaceuticals they’re blinded to somatic conditioning. (That’s assumptive: maybe Vakarian has brought it up, and Shepard said no for some unfathomable reason. Maybe the pills taste good?)

“It may be good for Shepard to spend some time with Vakarian unmedicated,” Ayelet says. A bit strange, considering Ayelet doesn’t normally care to play matchmaker, but there’s some movement in her face again and Graene is unwilling to question deeply. Spirits know there’s enough to deal with, and what does Graene know about alien psychiatric treatments?

“I nearly feel bad,” Graene says. 

“I suppose they’ve known each other as long as we have,” Ayelet points out. “Do you feel bad when I’m left alone with you?”

“Not usually,” Graene says. “But we both know Shepard can be difficult.”

“Shepard is not difficult,” Ayelet says. “Shepard is a walking reminder of the worst part of all of our lives, and she knows it.”

“It sounds good, but I’m not convinced,” Graene says. “Are you avoiding her?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Ayelet says, though her voice is very cold. 

“A bit dramatic,” Graene says, but drops it. “Have you eaten yet?”

+

“Okay, get talking,” Shepard says, the instant he opens the bedroom door. He shuts it. There is a few seconds of silence, and then he opens it again, looking mildly shame-faced, and sets a blanket on the floor. She sits, and he pulls it into the room. This is only marginally less humiliating than being carried, but it lets Shepard feel like she isn’t completely helpless. 

“Yeah, I don’t have a foot to stick in the doorway, asshole,” Shepard says as she passes him. Her arms hurt from holding herself up, and she pulls herself into the bed she’s been using. It’s hobbled halfway up the legs, and Garrus’ knees creak audibly when he joins her on it. 

“Force of habit,” Garrus says. “I’m just used to you getting in the way, I guess.”

“Classic,” she says. “Now explain how you helping me to the toilet is a big deal.”

“It isn’t specifically pissing together,” Garrus says, mandibles tight to his jaw. “You have to consider the context.”

“Explain to me how using the bathroom with another person present is romantic,” Shepard says, opening up her hands.

“It opens you up to being murdered,” Garrus says. 

“The old shoot-him-where-he-shits?”

“You’re being insensitive,” Garrus says.

“Oh,” Shepard says, lifting a hand. “Hold on. Which of us has died?”

“That’s a bit broad-”

“Literally died.”

“Symbolically,” Garrus starts, with a hard edge in his voice so that it sounds almost single-toned. 

“Symbolically dying notwithstanding!” Shepard says over him, almost shouting. When he stops talking she places her hands back on her thighs, composes her face, and continues primly, “Two times, actually.”

“You’re so full of it,” Garrus says in laughing disgust.

“Full of immortality,” Shepard says.

“I went into a murderous spiral,” Garrus says. He settles himself a little deeper into the bed, with a tiny sigh. She doesn’t ‘aww’, but it’s close.

“That doesn’t count either.”

“Oh, so we’re drawing the line at clinical definitions of death?” Garrus snorts, though it sounds more like he’s coughing up phlegm. “Pretty exclusive club.”

“Yeah,” Shepard says. “You just get the trauma without the companionship.”

“You get the biotic metabolism and the friends,” Garrus says. “This feels kind of unfair.”

“I am in pretty good shape,” Shepard says. 

“What’s left of you, anyway,” Garrus says. He doesn’t cross his fingers, but Shepard laughs.

“I can’t make up my mind whether I’m more mad that people keep changing me without asking, or that they keep making me shorter,” she admits.

“Shorter,” Garrus says. 

“Yes, you’d hate to give up looming,” Shepard says darkly. 

“Hey,” he says. “I do other things. I dawdle, sometimes.”

“You’re not really the kind of man who takes a laptop to a cafe and spends two hours looking busy,” Shepard says. “Not much of a dawdler.”

“I could take up gardening,” he says. “Or...go to second-hand stores and buy trinkets.”

“You’re out of ideas, aren’t you?” Shepard asks. 

“I am,” Garrus says with great dignity.

“I don’t want to, you know, dwell on our horrific experiences, but I really think you had the concept of ‘hobbies’ or ‘downtime’ hammered out of you,” Shepard says. 

“Turians don’t have hobbies,” Garrus says. “That’s not just me, that’s all of us.”

“Oh, go back to sleep,” Shepard says. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Speaking of,” Garrus says. “Do you think I’ve been having seizures in my sleep?”

“How would I know?”

“Have I been having seizures?” Garrus asks with exaggerated emphasis. 

“That would be the easiest way to tell,” Shepard says, sounding nettled. “But we’re both asleep at the same time, you jackass.” 

“I have been feeling pretty terrible,” Garrus says. “Don’t think I’ve had any in my waking hours though.”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Shepard says, itching her arm, where her blotchy hives have spread. “But I’ve been preoccupied.”

“Yes, with the all-consuming paperwork,” Garrus says. 

“No, my court martial,” Shepard says. “The paperwork, too, though, I hate a very small mystery.”

“Mm, the court martial,” Garrus says. “Interesting, that, considering you’re retired.”

“I thought so too,” Shepard says, resting her head against his arm. He tenses, and she tenses up feeling it. Still, neither of them move. “Special circumstances, I think.”

“You crushed her and then tore her apart in a spatial distortion,” Garrus says. “Let’s not dance around it.”

“You see what I mean.”

“Is this a firing squad sort of crime?” Garrus asks.

“Not sure,” Shepard muses, resting back on her elbows. “I’ll bet it won’t get me anything I’ll enjoy.”

“Well, at least they can’t torture you,” Garrus offers. Shepard considers this and concedes the point with a nod.

“They could put me back to work,” Shepard says after a moment. “Might be worse, frankly.”

“Not sure what’s bad about a paycheck,” Garrus says. He rolls his shoulder absentmindedly, Shepard’s head carried with it. It traces a stranger shape than she’d thought-more egg than circle. She adjusts her head upwards, and he tenses the smallest fraction more. 

“First of all, do I look like someone who has bills to pay?”

“Fair,” Garrus says. 

“Second of all,” Shepard says, thinking, cracking her knuckles. Garrus winces at the noise. “I’m all set firing someone else’s bullets.”

“With a paycheck you can buy your own,” Garrus advises.

“You know what I mean, Vakarian. With my luck I’ll get stuck in some biotic extremist shithole and have to wipe them out. Or have to hunt out the rest of Cerberus and wipe them out. Or sniff out some indoctrinated terrorists on Terra Nova and wipe them out.”

“I get the gist, Shepard.”

“I’m not saying I don’t deserve to be punished,” Shepard says. “I’m just not interested in the Alliance’s ideas of balancing the scale. I already spent too many years as their whipping boy.”

“You still make a damn fine propaganda piece,” Garrus says lightly. His mandibles are low and taut, like he senses this might be a place to tread carefully. Shepard laughs anyway. 

“There is that,” Shepard says. “Maybe they’ll just want me to act in some recruitment videos.”

“Commander Shepard’s top ten fitness tips,” Garrus says. “Commander Shepard’s favorite anniversary gifts. Commander Shepard’s five best holiday destinations.”

“Do I have any anniversaries?” Shepard asks. 

“Okay, okay,” Garrus says, patting her head. “Commander Shepard’s favorite funeral marches.”

“Morbid,” Shepard says. 

“I don’t make the headlines, I just write them,” Garrus says. “I get paid a credit per view, it has to be salacious.”

“Are funeral marches normally salacious?” Shepard asks. “Sounds more like a wedding thing.”

“Ah, speaking of,” Garrus says, so casually she’s almost impressed instead of alarmed. It doesn’t quite work, judging by the cold sweat she suddenly feels. 

“Yes, speaking of weddings,” Shepard says, not nearly as casually. Surely it’s about Vygdis Avenarius and her ‘Garrus Is Trying To Be Romantic’ alarm is ringing like an air raid siren because she’s so full of herself, or it’s only paranoia. 

“Turian citizens aren’t subject to Alliance pre-trial imprisonment,” Garrus says, clearing his throat very loudly and very poorly. He’s never had phlegm in the entire time Shepard has known him, and the sound is thin and reedy. “Or, ah, Alliance post-trial sentencing without Hierarchy consent.”

“Interesting,” Shepard says. Her cold sweat worsens. She’s a moron. He isn’t concerned about the propaganda joke, but something much worse: marriage. 

“Just spitballing here,” he says. 

“Are you proposing to me?” Shepard asks. She very nearly hits the right tone, not quite joking but sort of wry. It falls too flat, and she knows he can see she’s alarmed. “Trying to lighten justice’s heavy hand with a gold ring?”

“I only got about half of that,” Garrus says. “What does a ring have to do with this?”

“For Chrissakes,” Shepard says. “You want to get married to a human and you don’t even know how we do it?”

“First of all,” Garrus says, mimicking her own tone and phrasing in a way that makes her want to deck him, but he isn’t being sarcastic and she knows she’s being unfair, “Nobody is wanting to get married here. This is strictly for immigration fraud.”

“What’s the maximum sentence for that?” 

“Hard labor in the interior,” Garrus says, gesturing around them like she might have forgotten where they are. “If convicted. Which very rarely happens.”

“Because it’s so rare?” 

“No,” Garrus says. “Because people usually kill themselves first.”

“Nothing new there,” Shepard says, and Garrus doesn’t laugh. Tough crowd. Her fingers are trembling the tiniest bit, and she knots them together to hide it.

“The turian justice system is notoriously unforgiving,” Garrus says frankly, without concern or apology. “Is it better than being a one-bit prop with live weapons aimed at every shadow the Alliance comes across?”

“Not sure about that,” Shepard says.

“What’s it matter?” Garrus asks. “I know you, I know you can come up with an option to get out of both, but is it really so awful to consider? Humans have done it before.”

Shepard is struck silent with fury or fear, but only for a few moments. “Even you’re not too good to go for the cheap shot?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“A one-bit prop!” Shepard nearly spits, but she’s never seen someone do that outside of a movie, so she manages to keep it in. “You think we’ll get married, I’ll get off scot-free, and then it’ll all be golden apples and wine forever?”

“What are you talking about,” Garrus repeats, mandibles drooping in honest confusion. Maybe a little disappointment, but Shepard isn’t willing to look hard enough for it. It doesn’t help to know.

“Humans have done it before,” Shepard repeats in obvious disgust. She knows, even more clearly, how absurd and unfair she’s being, but she needs him to stop talking about it like she needs to breathe. He must be able to tell she’s putting it on like a costume, but his mandibles droop even lower. Worse yet, he can tell but he’s still hurt.

“I’m not playing on your need for a happy ending,” Garrus says. There’s no venom in his voice, but she wishes desperately there was. If they could argue instead it would be over already. “I just thought-”

“I know what you thought,” Shepard says, making her voice harder. She doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter. “What kind of person do you think I am, Garrus? Do you think I would do that to you? Completely cut you off from-”

“From any chance of getting rid of you?” Garrus snaps, finally cracking, and it doesn’t make her feel any better. It makes her nauseous. 

“We both know you’ll have to-”

“You’ve never had concerns about that before, Shepard, and you’re an asshole for pretending you do because you think I’m making a move on you!”

“You are making a move on me!”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Shepard?” he demands. “I don’t know what kind of asshole you think I am-”

“With me?” Shepard repeats in disbelief. She’s grasping for anything now, and her response is embarrassing from the moment it comes out. “Fuck you! I never said you’re an asshole.”

“Why would I get rid of you?”

“Kids?” Shepard tries, her anger slipping away, dizzy, feeling like she’s suddenly lost the thread of the entire argument but that he’s started his own. She tries another, almost at random. “Social status?”

“That’s your best argument?” Garrus asks, making a faint scornful burbling noise deep in his throat. “You really pulled out the big guns, Shepard.”

“We’ve never even been on a date,” Shepard says.

“You’re concerned about dating when you’re facing starring in safety videos?”

“I’m feeling manipulated,” Shepard says.

“Then keep being mad and ignore it,” Garrus says. “Don’t fall for it. I’m just saying, I don’t want to be the one coming up with patriotic jingles and shooting terrorists.”

“No,” Shepard says, still trying to dredge up her anger. “It’s-”

“I’m not taking advantage of your situation,” Garrus says sharply. “Cut that out.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Shepard retorts, although she was about to imply he only brought up the option because of his feelings. She isn’t too good for the cheap shot, either, and the truth has nothing to do with it. 

“Immigration fraud,” Garrus says again. His tone is completely normal again, but a wretched part of Shepard wonders if he’s trying to convince her or himself, and it makes her want to stick a spike in her eye all over again. Then she has to wonder if she’s only suspicious because she knows about how he feels, and she can feel the self-gnawing spiral about to skid away. 

“Judicial fraud,” she says instead. 

“Barely,” Garrus says. 

“Well, it’s,” Shepard says, and pauses. “I don’t...have any more arguments.”

“They’re going to keep trying to get you back, Shepard,” Garrus says. “I can’t promise the Hierarchy will be better to you, but you won’t be alone with it anymore.”

He doesn’t point out that he won’t be alone again, either, and she doesn’t mention it, but she knows he’s thinking it. Shepard has never betrayed him, burdened him, or stayed dead. She could see that being an appealing combination for a man who’s been betrayed and had his friends murdered over and over again. She finds it appealing herself. That, and Shepard couldn’t help when Garrus needed it on Omega or Menae, and here he is, trying to help her anyway. She tells herself the guilt is why she caves. 

“Well, when you put it that way,” Shepard says. He doesn’t smile, exactly, but he does seem to perk up a little. 

“So is this happening the human way or the turian way?”

“Unless you know of a rabbi nearby, then paperwork it is.”

They head for Cipritine early the next morning, before sunrise, still without seeing Edyt or her welcoming committee. They load up the jeep with Shepard’s robot transport, several packets of the ubiquitous-and-cheap yeast candies, and the sad remnants of Garrus’ monitor. Shepard holds this in her lap for the drive, nervously eyeing Garrus, though he blinks evenly and regularly with no sign of a seizure. The road back to Cipritine feels shorter than the way out, even counting the agonizing, terrifying slow crawl back up the cliffside with the mirrors all swaying in the wind. They stop for breakfast, and Shepard gets to see the sunrise from the rim of Cipritine’s caldera. The light sparkles off the honeycombs along the coast and with the rubble hidden by the distance she’s too impressed by the view to complain. 

First is the civil parson, where Shepard undergoes a grueling interview on the depth of her knowledge about Palaven. She fails it miserably a handful of questions in, and Garrus has to fast-talk the parson to get even a provisional marriage license on the grounds that if she can’t hear most turian noises, she can’t learn through audio lessons. After tt’s a very quick and very smooth wedding, with only a hiccup when Shepard can’t sign her name in Imperan letters. Shepard has never been married before, but she assumes the goal is to keep it as short as possible, and she appreciates the speed. It gives her less time to wring her hands. It gives her less time to chase her own tail with questions. 

No crowd greets them at the door to the parson’s office, which is both reassuring and disappointing. Shepard is glad that there are no plainclothes officers come to haul her in front of a firing squad, but what’s the point of celebrity if she doesn’t even get some public admiration out of it? Then she remembers that the whole point, nearly, is escaping that celebrity, and she almost bolts back into the office. Still better than propaganda, she tells herself. Still better than getting teenagers to enlist and wiping out krogan settlements. 

The ship’s marine contingent begins to gather nervously when Shepard and Garrus appear on the ship. There’s no ring to flash ostentatiously, so Shepard just continues barking orders until the marines disperse and she can make small talk. She flags down the last marine lingering, although she considers cutting him loose when all the blood drains from his face. The poor thing blanches so fast that Garrus chuckles behind her. 

“Tell me about this warrant,” Shepard says instead. She’s well past the time for empathy, she thinks. Empathy was for before she hammered her unwillingness into Garrus’ head. 

“It’s for a war crime,” the marine says nervously. He crooks his fingers into quotes and recites, “Willful usage of inhumane treatment and superfluous suffering.”

“Oh, come on,” Shepard says. She doesn’t have to fake the whiny pitch, only lean on it a little harder. “Am I the only one who doesn’t editorialize? Superfluous suffering!”

“You’re under arrest,” the marine says. It sounds like a question, and she shakes her head in disappointment. Scraping the barrel for recruits these days, she doesn’t wonder. 

“Can’t arrest me,” Shepard says, again wishing for a ring to wave around. She has a hunch she’s going to spend a long time repeatedly explaining that she’s gotten married, yes, this morning, yes, it’s legal. 

“War crime,” the marine says again and again, like a question. 

“It was murder,” Shepard says. “There’s a distinction. Besides, I’m out of your jurisdiction.”

“I don’t have anything to do with that,” the marine says, shifting uncomfortably. Still, he doesn’t flag down anyone that does. Either she’s scared him senseless, he’s dumber than a sack of rocks, or he really believes she’s out of their jurisdiction. Maybe she doesn’t need a ring to flash. 

“I can self-surrender,” Shepard says. She thinks, and adds, “Purely for discussion. I can show up and have a conversation, I guess you’d call it.”

“I mean,” the marine says with a little shrug. “I guess so.”

“No handcuffs?” Shepard asks. “I’m allergic to nickel.”

“Something like that,” the marine says, and steps back with his hands up. 

“And congratulate us, you asshole,” Shepard says. “It’s my wedding day!”

“No manners,” Garrus says, sounding unimpressed. He’s quiet, and she’s suspicious, but it’s been a hell-grade morning. She lets him be. The marine bolts, and Garrus chuckles again. 

“Didn’t even congratulate you,” he says. “The nerve.”

“Maybe he thought I was kidding,” Shepard offers.

“Or you’re just a criminal trying to get out of trouble,” Garrus says. Shepard concedes this with a wave of one hand. “Present circumstances excluded. Someone will make a big deal out of it eventually. Just watch.”

“Well, let’s go ruin someone else’s day then,” Shepard says. And off they go to ruin the consulate’s collective day just down the road, after informing the Langenauers of the morning’s happenings, though Garrus trails behind trying to shepherd the Langenauers back to the ship. Shepard’s robot dog slams squarely into a human man in the doorway, because it handles like a frigate and she’s only one person on all that deck. He doesn’t fall, but when he staggers Shepard can see the entire front room is nearly bare and no one else is in sight. Interesting. It’s an awfully big building to not have any reception or staff, mostly above-ground with several large windows. Someone must scrub the fingerprints off, and someone must cook for the cleaners.

“Ah, you must be here for the AWJ meeting,” the man says, recovering admirably. He’s a little sunburnt across the nose and he carries a small handbag, through the top of which Shepard can see crumpled up papers. He pushes his sunglasses up onto the top of his head, and Shepard admires the look of this briefly. A good looking man is a good looking man and she’ll make no bones about it. 

“Do I have a tag on or something?”

“No, we just don’t get a lot of human visitors,” the man says. He doesn’t gesture at her missing legs, but she assumes that that isn’t very common for their visitors either. His English is accented, but she can’t quite place it. It nearly sounds like when Garrus speaks English, but it’s too flat and drawled.

“It wasn’t a war crime, we don’t need the AWJ,” Shepard says. “It was murder, if anything. Cut me some slack.”

“My name is Waylen Mcneil,” the man says without laughing but also without frowning. “The consulate has assigned me as your attaché and general guide during the court-martial process. Pleased to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Shepard says, enjoying the words, all things considered. She’s always enjoyed small talk and pleasantries. The function is universal even if the form of the words isn’t. Nothing more civilized than small talk and pleasantries. “You a navy man?”

“Civilian,” Mcneil says. “I serve as an advisor to the consulate on particularly sensitive cultural issues. In your case, I have the needed familiarity with the turian immigration system and roadblocks it may present.”

“I don’t fall under the navy’s jurisdiction anymore,” Shepard says. “I’m retired.”

“Some would make the argument that your continued use of Alliance resources makes you subject to their authority,” Mcneil says. 

“And the Alliance’s continued use of me as a resource during the war puts them under my authority?” Shepard asks, unimpressed. 

“No,” Mcneil says. “You were unquestionably under naval authority from the time of your enlistment to your retirement. Some also make the argument your usage was not materially different than any other weapon.”

“My Spectre appointment doesn’t play into this?”

“Not really.”

“The Council’s appointment was the Council’s problem,” Shepard says. Mcneil inclines his head to concede the point. 

“If the Council would like to become involved in your trial there are established precedents for that,” Mcneil says. “Not directly applicable if someone chose to bring in your former Spectre status, of course, but you were also not an active Spectre at the time of the crime.”

“And the Council is dead,” Shepard says. 

“Just so,” Mcneil says, inclining his head. 

Garrus follows her in then, still calling something over his shoulder to one of the Langenauers, maybe trying to get them to leave already. He stops beside Shepard and when she looks up at him he seems, for a moment, very tall and broad and alien. He sounds like a lawnmower engine and his fringe is, she thinks, rippling a bit, like grass in a breeze. Then his quiet noise stops and his mandibles cover all those extra teeth and the moment passes. He even shakes Mcneil’s hand, though he uses the wrong one first. 

“Garrus Vakarian,” he says. “Sorry, I had to finish up out there.”

“Waylen Mcneil,” Mcneil says. “I was just introducing myself to your wife. I’m the go-between for your party and the Alliance.”

Shepard wonders for a split second who this wife is, and when she remembers she has to choke back her nauseated shock. Maybe soon it’ll stop being a sick surprise. Maybe she can stop feeling like a moron that makes terrible decisions. She isn’t optimistic, even without a timeline to beat. It’s no more than she deserves. She wonders, instead, how Mcneil knew already, but it’s been a few hours. Someone would have lodged paperwork at the consulate by now, surely. 

“How long have you lived in Cipritine?” Garrus asks. Shepard pulls off her jacket and spreads it over her lap. It’s far too hot, even for silk-thin environmental shielding. At least the robot doesn’t heat up. She can feel her skin prickle from the heat almost immediately, but it feels nice after the dim quiet of Edyt’s curtain-drawn compound. Not all turians live underground, but Edyt must have half the planet riddled with tunnels. 

“Twenty five years or so,” Mcneil says. “I moved here as a teenager and somehow moving again just never came up.”

“It’s one of the more xeno-friendly cities,” Garrus says. He squints at Shepard, like he’s wondering why she’s always so concerned about radiation and dirt when Mcneil is wearing khaki shorts and a buttoned floral shirt. She makes a note to explain ‘sunscreen’ and ‘magnified cancer risk from eezo nodules’ more clearly later. 

“Allow me to bring you both up to speed,” Mcneil says. “The extradition treaty does still apply, but you have some loopholes to climb through. You’ll potentially have to take it up with a lawyer, but I’m reasonably confident that as a biotic you fall into one of the protected categories.”

“You just had to go and retire,” Garrus says with a sigh. 

“Defecting military is another, yes,” Mcneil says. “Although if your argument is that you weren’t subject to naval authorities, you lose the impact by simultaneously making your sanctuary case on your military status.”

“My amp is Alliance-issued,” Shepard points out. “One that’s military-only bioequipment, still active.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Mcneil says, looking troubled. “Assuming you get far enough to make conditions for release to turian authorities, that could be an issue.”

“You think they’ll ask for it back?”

“I’m certain they’ll ask for it back,” Mcneil says, and with a surprising burst of spite adds, “The consul can be petty.” 

“I don’t like that,” Shepard says. “Who’s the ranking official on Palaven?”

“There isn’t one,” Mcneil says. “There’s no base on-planet and the consul is the highest ranking civilian authority.”

“You’re still a biotic,” Garrus says. “Even if it isn’t very-” Whatever he is about to add to that gets cut off when Shepard makes a nasty face at him. None of Mcneil’s business that the amp can make naturally piddling biotics into city destroyers. Shepard doesn’t know if she’s piddling or a city destroyer, but isn’t that the problem? If she can’t get the fireworks going without an amp then there’s no value in taking on an alien war criminal. 

“I’ve had an amp since I was a teenager,” Shepard says. “I don’t think I’ve been measured without one since.”

“If you could get hold of medical records with that information you would still have documentation of biotic status,” Mcneil says. 

“We do have amps,” Garrus says. “I assume.”

“Some,” Mcneil says. 

“Nothing for nothing, but I’m not sure I want to put a turian amp into my brain,” Shepard says. “Or have brain surgery for some consul’s power trip.”

Shepard might be a provisional turian by marriage, but she hasn’t been co-opted into their military yet, and she sure as hell isn’t joining a cabal. No human biotic is unaware of what other species do to their biotics. On the flip side of the biotic coin, she’s already had two amps, and two brain surgeries. Shepard was, at one point, an adventurous woman, but she isn’t sure she’s up to cramming alien wetware into her brain. Kaidan’s migraines were bad enough to witness, and he was on the easy end of biotic side-effects. She touches the back of her head, right at the base. The port is too small and smooth for her to feel, but she knows exactly where it is. A little static electricity shocks her fingers, and she wonders if she could manage even that much without the amp. 

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come up,” Garrus says. “That isn’t right.”

“It will,” Shepard says. “I mean, the platinum in it alone is worth a fortune.”

“It is not, I think, a restricted technology,” Mcneil says, looking to Shepard to contradict him. “Limited quantities for import, but available.”

“The good ones aren’t the kind you can import,” Shepard says, and shrugs. “Better than nothing, though I’m not sure who would put it in. It’s a pretty delicate operation. They have to be tuned right.”

“Could it make your head explode?” Garrus asks. 

“Probably not,” Shepard says, although she tucks that one away to research later. 

They stay in what Shepard thinks of as a motel in Cipritine’s center, although the rooms are all underground. It barely beats Mcneil’s offer of the consulate housing, where he implies much of the building is under camera surveillance but breakfast includes foods Shepard can eat. Even so, it’s not much of a honeymoon. Their ersatz motel turns up the humidity, with many coy comments about humans and their delicate skin. Lotions and snacks are brought out in a dusty box from a back room, as if to say human guests are so delicate that they need to keep a kit of emergency supplies on hand. The room is not unlike a cozy nuclear silo, though with more of a damp cave atmosphere. Shepard wipes her forehead and shakes off the sweat in disgust. Probably the wettest place she’s been on this miserable planet. She eats a couple of yeast candies, just for the sweetness, as they’re not doing much for her headache.

“I’m going to rust,” Garrus says. He looks almost wilted. She doesn’t pat his arm for fear of sticking to him. “Surely it’s easier for you to just put lotion on?”

“I miss my armor,” Shepard says mournfully. She picks at her sunburn, which has been quietly festering under her clothing for some time now. “I’m going to need chemo if I keep going outside, but this sucks too.”

“Damn it,” Garrus says. “I owe Graene ten credits.”

“You gamble?”

“When I have nothing better to do,” Garrus says, and shrugs. “I never thought I’d hear you say you missed your armor.”

“Bulky, but I do love biological shielding,” Shepard says. 

“And the catheter,” Garrus says.

“Good point,” Shepard says, and pauses for a moment before asking, “You bet on the armor but not on whether I would get cancer?”

“No,” Garrus says. “That’s just to-be-determined. I could still come out ahead.”

“You’re fucked up, Vakarian, but you’re thorough,” Shepard says, and pats his arm. She doesn’t stick, but there’s an unpleasant squelching noise. She winces a little. 

“Humans,” Garrus says. His mandibles are loose and held low, though he doesn’t laugh in a way that Shepard can hear. “All it takes to impress you people is a little money changing hands.”

“We’re an easy market to satisfy,” Shepard says, and eats another fistful of candies. “A bed would be impressive too.”

“You sleep in turian beds just fine,” Garrus says. 

“It feels like a bowl,” Shepard says. 

“You have plenty of space,” Garrus says. 

“Yes, but it’s the ambiance,” Shepard says, waving vaguely at the bed. “I sleep without a blanket, that’s fine, I just want to not feel like a pillbug.”

“You’re not used to bermed buildings is all,” Garrus says. 

“So because I’m underground I feel like a bug?” Shepard asks. “No. I feel like a bug because I’m stuck on my back in a bowl.”

“You aren’t stuck on your back,” Garrus says. 

“Yeah, you say that now,” Shepard says. “Let’s see tomorrow when I’m in pain.”

“They aren’t even that much deeper than Edyt’s,” Garrus says, sighing through his nose. It whistles a little. She doesn’t laugh, with monumental effort. “You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m uncomfortable,” Shepard says.

“Sleep on the floor,” Garrus says, and shrugs. She’s put off, for a moment, by the way his whole cowl gets thrown into it. Then she remembers again that they’re married, and she crams a fistful of yeast candies into her mouth. 

“I know the drill,” Shepard says grimly, words distorted by the candies. She fusses around for a moment, feeling like an idiot, because she has no pajamas to put on or toothbrush to use or legs to remove, and even if she had, a human bedtime routine isn’t something Garrus is going to notice or care about. 

Turians don’t seem to have the assumption of consummation that Shepard thinks a human would, though he does climb into the same bowl. Garrus neither looks at her nor speaks before passing out face down. Shepard lies in rigid panic for what feels like hours regardless, jacket crammed under her head like a pillow. She is queasy at the thought of sex in these circumstances, but she doesn’t want to understand why. It should be nothing new, with Garrus, in a fraught situation, with tension left unexplored. It is still somehow paralyzingly new and strange, and her stomach roils. She had wanted this, or something like it, and sometimes she still does, so deeply it almost makes her sick. 

Even so, it feels like there’s a gun to her head. She doesn’t want to understand that one, either. She leans over and threads the sleeve of her jacket out of his mouth, pinched right where the mandible meets his jaw and in imminent danger of being bit in half. 

“Yuck,” she mumbles, and swabs the sleeve over his face. “Drooler.”

“Tell Mcneil to get you a lawyer,” Garrus says, muffled, into his arm. 

“Fucks’ sake!” Shepard yelps, startled, slapping at his head. Garrus moves his arm away from his face and tucks it over Shepard. He moves so slowly that she has plenty of time to protest or move, but she does neither. She rests her hands on top of his arm. He then moves his head close, and stops when she freezes with a violent shudder. After several minutes, he makes a soft warbling noise that she thinks of as snoring. 

Eventually, she sleeps too.


End file.
